From an AP story April 3,

“PITTSBURGH – A gunman wearing a bulletproof vest and ‘lying in wait’ opened fire on officers responding to a domestic disturbance call Saturday, killing three of them and turning a quiet Pittsburgh street into a battlefield, police said.

Police Chief Nate Harper said the motive for the shooting isn’t clear, but friends said the gunman recently had been upset about losing his job and feared the Obama administration was poised to ban guns.”

So naturally, the only logical course of action, if you think the government is going to take your guns, is to shoot three cops. I mean, there is absolutely nothing else you can do, right?

What makes me nutty about the far-right lunatic fringe and their current hysteria about President Obama snatching up guns is that he’s said he doesn’t want to. And even if he said he wanted to, he’d have to fight it through Congress. And even if he said he wanted to, and he fought it through Congress, there’s that little pesky bit of parchment: the United States Constitution.

But according to the whackos, President Obama is going to wave a magic wand and suddenly all the guns are going to be outlawed.

This asshole in Pittsburgh is exactly what happens when that kind of foaming-at-the-mouth rhetoric is given airing in mainstream media. Once upon a time, stuff like that was the province of sheet-wearers, of Tri-Lateral Commission conspiracists, of those who were suspicious of fluoride in the water.

Does this tinfoil hat make my ass look big?

There is a person I know who, in the days after the election, walked around with his head hung low, telling anyone who was stupid enough to listen that the world for his children was over and they were as good as dead.

“Hey, Daddy, what’d you do at work today?”

“It doesn’t matter, junior, because tomorrow or next week or next month, you’ll be dead.”

These days we have Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Bachman and what else do we need? Bachman, especially, a member of the U.S. House and calling herself a ‘foreign correspondent behind enemy lines in Washington,’ and telling her voters she wanted them ‘armed and dangerous’ when it came to the ‘revolution,’ needs to take a long think about what she’s saying.

Maybe she should go to the Pittsburgh police funerals, just to see the effect of what she babbles.

It’ll never happen, she’s too busy on the Sunday morning news shows, being given airtime by the same media of which I was once a member. It embarrasses me. What was once a dignified and respected branch of our self-governance is now a naked and slathering chase for ratings.

I’m not saying we should censor what the nuts say. Part of a healthy democracy is nuts wiping foam from their lips. Plus, sometimes the nuts are fun to watch. What I’m saying is if you’re going to use your freedom of speech, you need to have some responsibility about it. If you’re going to call for armed rebellion (which, last time I checked, was actually treason), then you need to accept responsibility when one of you shoots and kills three public servants.

But in this country, in this particular time, personal responsibility, aside from being a hollow right-wing mantra, is nothing more than a pipe dream.

Meanwhile, three cops are dead because…because…my gosh…they’re going to take my guns!

It pains me to watch the videotape.

(from the 25-year old officer’s dash cam, after some back and forth about whether or not NFL player Ryan Moats stopped or rolled a couple of red lights)

Officer Robert Powell: (Moats’ SUV) is not an emergency vehicle. You do not have the right to control the traffic.

Moats: All right … just go ahead and check my insurance so I can go ahead and go. If you’re gonna give me a ticket, give me a ticket. I really don’t care, just …

Powell: Your attitude says that you need (a ticket).

Moats: I don’t have an attitude. All I’m asking you is just to hurry up. Cause you’re standing here talking to me.

Powell: Shut your mouth and listen.

Moats: Shut my mouth? Is that how you talk to me, too?

Powell: Shut your mouth and listen. If you want to keep this going, I’ll just put you in handcuffs, and I’ll take you to jail for running a red light.

Moats: OK. All right.

Powell: I can do that.

Moats: OK.

Powell: State law says I can.

Moats: Yes, sir. Go ahead.

Powell: If you don’t settle down that’s what I’m gonna do.

Moats: Yes, sir.

Powell: All right, If you don’t settle down, your truck’s illegally parked – I’ll tow that as well.

Moats: Yes, sir.

Powell: OK, I can screw you over. I’d rather not do that. Your attitude will dictate everything that happens, and right now, your attitude sucks.

Moats: Yes, sir.

Powell: OK, I turned my red and blues on as you were going over the bridge …

Moats: You think I’m gonna stop when my wife’s mother is dying?

Powell: You are required to stop. What you’re doing does not matter. Red and blues, you have to stop. I can charge you with fleeing right now.

Moats: Yes, sir. …

Powell: I can take you to jail. I can tow your truck. I can charge you with fleeing.

Moats: Yes, sir, you can. I understand.

Powell: I can make your night very difficult.

Moats: I hope you’ll be a great person and not do that.

How many times can Moats say ‘yes, sir?’ How many times can he say ‘Ok?’ How often can he agree with the officer and still the officer lays out the myriad ways he can ‘screw’ Moats over? (yeah, a great conversation for a white officer who has stopped a car full of blacks). Or was it that the cop knew he had an NFL star on his hands and wanted to show what a man he was?

That entire exchange is nothing but a young punk with a hard dick.

Yes, he’s a cop. Yes, I’m a cop. But he and I are made from completely different cloth.

This happened a few days ago in Dallas. Moats was, with some of his family, rushing to a hospital where his mother-in-law was dying. With his flashers going, he ran some stop signs.

Illegal?

Absolutely. Completely illegal.

Worthy of a ticket? Absolutely fucking not.

If he’d rolled red lights without his flashers or without slowing down to check on-coming traffic, and if he’d stopped outside of a strip club, then yeah, write his ass. But that’s not what happened. Moats went to a hospital. He had his flashers on and while those don’t make a private car an emergency vehicle, that is standard and accepted practice for American drivers with emergencies.

How many clues can this cop miss?

So in the face of clue after clue after clue that this was legitimate, the officer decided to play King Cobra and detain Moats, whose mother-in-law died while this penny-ante panty-waist son of a bitch made sure he got his ticket written.

And, oh, by the way, the ticket was dropped. Why? Because it was a bullshit ticket. Circumstances and context point up the crap quotient of this ticket. Again, we’re outside a hospital, not a strip club or a grocery store or a damned brothel.

Now, in the officer’s defense (which makes my bowels hurt to have to do), a part of the beginning of the traffic stop was legit. He stopped Moats and immediately at least two people jumped out and came toward him.

I’ve been there and it’s fucking scary.

As an officer, you have no idea who these people are, no idea what they’re doing or why they’re coming at you. And more officers are hurt and killed in traffic stops than anything else we do. Remember…the first two officers killed last week in Oakland were murdered on a routine traffic stop. Speeding. Or failing to signal. Or running a red light.

So when the Dallas copper ordered them back in the car, I had no problem. Nor had I a problem with the fact that his gun was drawn at the beginning of the incident. But you get that thing put away quick when you understand you are not facing a deadly threat situation. Up until then, it was good tactics (if you can get past all the clues he missed that he should never have made the stop to begin with).

But after that, after the point at which everyone in the car tells him what’s going on, after he gets a face full of their obvious distress and emotion, the cop went Sarah Palin rogue, doing his own thing and stewing in his own sense of righteous.

There is a Thin Blue Line in law enforcement, a sense that One shall not speak ill of Another and to a degree, I understand that. Until you’ve stood in a kitchen and had a PCP junkie attack you, take your gun, and fight you for nearly 12 minutes, you have no conception of what most officers face everyday.

So I try to not criticize officers until I know exactly what they were facing. But sometimes, everything you need to see is right in front of you. In this case, it was all on the videotape.

Here’s something else: the officer had the SUV.

Get it? Even if it had been a righteous ticket, the officer had the SUV. They had to come back to it at some point. They weren’t going to walk home. They weren’t going to take a damned taxi. Was the SUV stolen? Could have been, but how many car thieves slow down for red lights and drive with their flashers on? The basic premise of auto theft is to NOT get caught; drawing attention makes getting caught more likely.

The officer should have let Moats and his family deal with their issue. Then, once that was done, he could have dealt with his issue with them.

But the traffic ticket doesn’t matter. Powell’s interaction with Moats doesn’t matter. A young cop, probably scared, trying to control a situation he created and which got out of hand damned fast, doesn’t matter. All those things are window dressing for the larger problems.

First: The Big Listen.

Almost everything we do as police officers hinges on what I call The Big Listen. You have to hear what comes out of people’s mouths. If you don’t, then everything else you try to do – arrests, citations, investigations – is just wasted time.

This cop didn’t listen to a single word Moats said. Nor did he listen when a hospital security guard and a nurse came out to explain the situation to him.

Everyone told him what was going on and he hunkered down and concentrated on writing that ticket.

Siege mentality. Everyone on the planet was telling him at that moment – and every moment since – that he’d screwed it up. I’d bet he felt bombarded with criticism and probably self-doubt and so he stuck to his metaphoric guns. There are officers who believe with absolute certainty there should never be any apologies or any backing up once they take a stand and that’s the stand he took.

Second: The Big Rule.

This is my biggest problem with the entire incident. That kid stood tall behind his badge and then hid behind the rules.

When questioned, he said he followed the rules and said he believed he acted appropriately. In other words, his hands were tied. There are rules and policies and procedures for just such an incident and he followed them to the letter.

In other other words, he gave over his situational judgment to something written down in a dusty manual.

Yeah, that’s a problem.

We want our officers making judgments and using common sense. We want them to take into account every bit of information that comes their way. We do not want them slavishly following every single rule that some suit wrote only after it went through ten or fifteen committees.

Said this kid’s chief, at a press conference: “(Powell’s) behavior, in my opinion, did not exhibit the common sense, discretion, the compassion that we expect our officers to exhibit.”

Common sense and discretion.

The chief went on to say, when asked what officers are trained to do in such a situation, that even someone with no police training should have known better than to do what Powell did.

“I don’t know how you train for these circumstances, other than to hire people with common sense and good people skills,” he said.

This kid in Dallas, scared to death by the can of crap he’d opened, chose to hide behind the rules rather than coming out and saying he’d screwed the pooch and apologizing.

I’ve been there. When things start to move so fast you can’t really control them. And it is incredibly difficult to stop events and do any sort of evaluation. Yet officers have to be able to stop the train, in a situation where there are no lives in jeopardy, and see if the train needs to be put on a different track.

This kid will never be a good officer. He needs to leave the profession and sell hotdogs at the ball park.

Do I say that based on this single incident? Based on a situation that got out of hand where he lacked common sense and made unwarranted threats of arrest? A situation that he didn’t have the life or career experience to stand up to?

No. I say this based on the fact that, after the incident, while the tape was still recording, he mentioned to another officer that he had ‘worded’ a report to justify a police chase he was involved in back in January.

Turns out this punk may have lied about how the pursuit began.

In other words, it was another situation that got out of control too quickly for him to fix. And rather than fixing it afterward, rather than talking to his command staff, he ‘worded’ a report. So when the shit was thick, his instinct was to lie rather than to solve the problem.

I do not like criticizing officers without all the information, but when you do this to Moats, and then you tell another officer that you wrote a report a certain way so as to hide certain facts, you need to get the fuck out. This kid is making all of us look bad. He is undermining everything I do on the street.

This kid, with his bullshit ‘I’m the boss and I’ll take you to jail and if it ain’t right I’ll just lie on my report,’ is making things more dangerous for me. The Thin Blue Line can’t – and shouldn’t – condone that kind of bullshit.

Turn in your badge and gun, you schlub, and grab some extra mustard for the people in section 312.

Okay, here’s the thing: I fucking hate dog whistles.

Hang on, let me be more specific.  I fucking hate political dog whistles.

I’m reading this screed this morning by a woman I went to high school with.  She was goofy then and apparently she’s goofy now.  It’s all about how Texas has the legal right to secede from the union and form its own nation, blah blah blah.  It’s the standard, “Wouldn’t all us Texans be so much better with them ol’ Yankees?” routine that Texans so love.  It’s a fun academic exercise, but not really anything more than that.  I’ve been known to play it, too….

…when I’m drunk.

But she peppers her entire thing with, rather than humor that would make it fun, constant stabs at President Obama.  Okay, I get it, there are people who can’t stand him, people who think he has ruined the country (pretty amazing feat since he’s only been in office a few damned weeks!), people who think ain’t no way no darkie oughta be the Prez’nit.

If that’s what you think, stand up and say it.  Have the balls to freaking say it!  Say what you believe, rather than couching it in political dog whistles.

See, the ultra right wing has coded language they use whenever they want to communicate with the tribes.  It’s a politcal dog whistle, only the right wing can hear it.

B. Hussein Obama.  That’s what she kept calling him.

Okay, first of all, the only right-wing whacko calling him that is Ann Coulter so this high school chum of mine (as opposed to shark chum) is listening to Mr. Ann Coulter for her information.  Secondly, B. Hussein Obama is Mr. Coulter’s way of letting all the paranoids out there know that President Obama is, in fact, an Arab terrorist.

So here’s the thing: if you think he’s a terrorist, fucking say it.  Don’t hide it behind coded language.  Have the goddamned balls to stand up and say, “I think Barack Obama is a terrorist!”

Much like I’ll say, “W. is an intellectual creampuff.”

So there.

(now here’s the after-blog-rant question: is saying Mr. Coulter a political dog whistle, too, or just my way of saying, ‘Wow, look at her Adam’s Apple?’)

So I’m back in radio.

But not like a triumphant return.  It’s just Trey…working in radio again.  The on-air studio actually looks like the performance studio at KUVO in Denver.  It’s large and carpeted, beige on the walls and floor, and a long counter on one wall.  At said counter is the sound desk.

I walk in for a shift and the board is absolutely buried in crap.  Old commercials, commercials that haven’t been run yet, none of the air spots have been put away and they’re piled on the sound desk like carcasses after a rattlesnake hunt.  There are so many CDs left out that they’ve fallen to the floor.  Notes and scripts are everywhere, the text marked out in black and rewritten in red and red-penned in green.  Two of three cups of cold coffee, a bottle or two of flat, warm soda.  Old bits of pizza.

And worst of all, I can’t tell, from the marked up playlist and hour-script, where the hell we are.  I can’t tell if we’ve done the last break of the hour or the first break of the next hour, I can’t tell what ads and network make-goods have been run – if any – and the phone lines are lit up like a fucking low-rent Christmas tree.

I stand there, at the sound desk, some kind of Muzak music blasting over the on-air speakers, and I have no idea what to do.  The mess is so humongous, so all out of proportion to anything I’ve ever dealt with, that it has me in absolute, paralytic vapor lock.  Not only do I not know how to begin to clean this shit up, I don’t even know how to think about figuring out how to begin.

And that’s it.  The whole dream.

Next up on the hit parade, the trip through Trey’s subconscious in a vaguely interesting but mostly navel-gazing sort of way: my schooling.

I’m finished with the current class and it’s time for the exam.  But unlike reality, I am in a room with my rat bastard instructor and he’s handing out those little ScanTron sheet where you fill in the bubbles.  I’m sitting at a table with two #2 pencils and a tabletop jukebox.

He hands me the sheet and tells the class – and I seem to be the only one in class – not to do anything until he tells us.

So I promptly write my name on the ScanTron sheet.

And he promptly comes over, this hypocritical bastard more interested in format than content, and tears my sheet up.  He glares at me and says, “Do it when I tell you.”

Uh…yes, sir, Mr. Control Freak, sir, no problem.

He hands me another sheet and I do NOTHING.  I sit and wait.  And wait.  And then, when I’ve done that, I wait some more.

He, on the other hand, is doing I have no freaking idea what.  So, bored, I turn to the jukebox because we all know how much I love me musics.  I punch up something and lovely notes fill the air.

And my instructor, the rat bastard mope, he loses his fucking mind.

He races over to me, tears up my ScanTron sheet again, and then hands me two tickets.

Yeah, tickets.  Like what you’d get from a cop.  And not traffic citations, but actual criminal citations.  They’re both for cheating and, using that odd dream knowledge people seem to have, I know they’re felony tickets and there’s not thing one I can do about them.

Then I’m done.  Poof, just like that.  Dreams are over, move along, nothing to see here.

What makes me sad is that my dreams are generally so banal, so easy to interpret as to be boring.  Once, during the Chemo (and that’s how I’ve come to think of it, with a capital), my dreams were freaky and odd, with disco lights flashing and acidhouse jazz in the background…sort of like a coke binge…ahem, so I’ve heard.

Now they’re just boring.  My instructor is a complete control freak who has been hammering me on format rather than content – yeah, because I started a Master’s Program to learn format – and who told me he was going to make me a better person by teaching me how to write well.

Yeah, no shit on that score.  My friend Brad in Atlanta mumbled something about a piano wire garrotte and missing limbs but I don’t know anything about that if it happens.

So that dream was just my fear of really screwing that class up badly enough to get arrested.

The first, then, is nothing more than me feeling out of control – again.  I’m sure it has to do with the bankruptcy and all kinds of little officious people telling me what to do and when to do it and what to pay and how to pay it and exactly how much money I can earn and not earn so as to fall into the bracket where I can actually declare bankruptcy and when to do my counseling (oh, yeah, two separate sessions of financial counseling are part of the package, wherein a guy asks all kinds of questions designed to make you feel like a complete fucking idiot for having had some financial problems when Bush’s economy fell completely apart).

Whew…the bankruptcy has been fun.  You should all try it.  It’s almost as much fun as…as…a heart attack.  Or maybe cancer and a year’s worth of Chemo!

Oh, wait, been there, done that.

It’s a tiled room. The tile was probably once white but now it’s grimy and dirty and vaguely nicotine yellow. The room is big, big enough so that it fades into the darkness about twenty feet from me in all directions. There are some half-high walls that seem to surround individual showers and rusty drains in the floor and bits and pieces of dark, broken grout everywhere.

The light is as though it’s coming from me, like I’m carrying a naked 25 watt incandescent bulb and it’s not tossing out much light at all. What light there is is dark and dank and somehow mirrors the room.

And I’m the only one.  Standing alone, wondering what in hell I’m doing there.

At some point, I realize I’m standing ankle deep in blood. The entire floor is covered four inches deep in blood.  It trails off into the darkness but I know it’s there, I can just tell.

And I keep repeating, in a voice that is sometimes scream and sometimes anxious and all times terrified, “It all counts. It all counts.”

My life was pretty full just about that time, and it was all stress and obviously I felt as though the world was bleeding me. There’s a great Metallica song, “Yeeeeaaahhhh, it’s blee – ding meeeee.”

Ah, the delusions of the self-centered.

See, I love dreams. I love how cockeyed they are and how odd and disconnected. ‘What the hell did THAT part mean?’ They’re sort of like foreign films. No, they’re like foreign, art-house films. They obviously mean something, but who the hell knows what…just like a foreign art house film done in black and white with subtitles and lots of anthropomorphizing about animals and cars and a stick or whatever.

So, a few weeks later, I have another dream. This time, I’m on duty and I go to a house to take a report. I start asking the wife questions and she, being the snippy bitch that I somehow know – with that semi-complete dream knowledge you get – tells me she’s not making the report, her husband is.

“Fine, where is he?”

“I’m right here, asshole.”

The voice is extremely high pitched, like fucking Alvin and the Chipmunks of something. And it seems to be coming from below me so I look down, expecting a short guy I just hadn’t seen…like a bad Vaudeville routine, right?

Yeah, he’s waaaaaaaaaay shorter than that.

And he’s not quite all there. Not mentally, but physically. He’s missing some parts.

Like…everything

Okay, not technically true. He’s still got his nose.  And the top of his skull.  Other than that?  Nada.

He’s talking to me, with no mouth, and I can hear him breathing, with no lungs, and he’s moving around, with no legs or feet, and I’m thinking, “Why would she marry him? She’s pretty cute, she could do better.”

And this guy, who seems to be moving around on a roller skate of some sort, is pissing and moaning and trying to give me some information and all I can think about is ‘What the hell kinda roller skate is he on?”

Blink, I’m awake and that one’s over and we move on to the next.

I’m driving with LuAnn’s father. He’s 84 or something and his driving’s starting to suck.  We’re driving up a huge hill on a dirt road and Othmar keeps pulling to the right. The car’s about halfway off the road and I’m afraid we’re going to tumble off the side of this hill.

So I grab the wheel and put us back on the road and he just laughs and laughs and then we’re at the top.

And we just keep going. Right over the crown of that fucker and down the other side.

The other side is like a roller coaster. The front of the car keeps dipping and dipping now we’re free falling straight down. The view is just like the Christ Redeemer statue in Rio. You know it. You see pictures from behind the statue all the time, looking 2,300 feet straight down at Rio de Janeiro. Yeah, THAT angle.

That’s what we’re falling. Straight down. Scared me so badly I woke up and thought I’d peed the bed.

So LuAnn says, “Well, it means that even when you’re in control, you’re not.”

See, I took the wheel to make sure we didn’t crash off the side of the mountain. Instead, with me in control, we crashed off the front of the mountain. So even if I have control, I’m going to fuck things up.

How’s that for an upbeat assessment? Take the wheel, crash anyway.

So the lesson is what?  Let an 84 year old man drive?  Or maybe I can drive, just do it with no hands on the wheel?

Or maybe just take the fucking bus.

l right, here’s my problem with Rock Band:

Rather than playing a fake instrument, learn to play a real one.

I know a ton of people who love this game and that’s fine, I guess.  But they all talk about wanting to be rock stars (and can we please, please for the love of whatever God you dig, lose ‘He’s a rock star,’ as any kind of cultural conversational touchstone?  It’s as bad as ‘thrown under the bus.’) but none of them want to actually learn to play.

Pick up a damned instrument.  You wanna be a rock star?  Learn some chords.  Learn some funkadelic bass lines.  Buy some drums and toss on a Dave Matthews or Rush CD, play along to those.  Or Billy Cobham or Manu Katche.

Holy hell, just do something!

Instead, this being the land of the lazy, we’d rather play a game and pretend to be a musician than put in some actual time and become a…you know…musician.

When I worked at DJ’s Music Box in Denver, an odd combination of sheet music, instruments, and music boxes, there was a guitar instructor there.  His belief was that music was too easy, too accessible.  He believed that music had lost some of its elegance and mystery and romance because anyone could be a musician.  It was too easy, he used to tell me, to become a musician.

That was crap then and it’s crap now.  I believe there was more music in centuries gone by because people didn’t have radios and TVs and daily newspapers and the Internet.  Other than dueling or weaving your own clothes or castrating the livestock, there wasn’t squat to do!  So there were entire families who were musical.  Go back and read diaries and daily accounts of family life 100, 200, 300 years ago.  When there was free time, which was very damned often because of that whole castration situation, they yanked out the instruments.

With absolutely no evidence to support it, I’d lay even money that there was a musician in damn near every family.  Everybody played something – piano, guitar, harmonica, violin, fucking brown jug.

So Americans, many of whom have gotten so lazy that the American dream has gone from ‘work hard and better yourself’ to ‘buy a winning lottery ticket,’ or ‘slip on the ice and sue everyone,’ have decided that learning to play an instrument just takes too much damned time.  It’s much easier to pretend at making music.

‘Trey, Trey, take a breath, it’s just a game.’

True enough, and I realize the game isn’t really about playing at being a musician, it’s about playing at being a celebrity, ‘cuz that’s what we all want now. The entire country, at least those younger than me (and it’s always those young whippersnappers fouling things up, ain’t it?), worships now at the altar of celebrity.  But even better than celebrity is instant celebrity, doubly so if built around…well…nothing.

Oh, for the days when you had to do something to get famous.  Neil Armstrong had to…you know…land on the moon.  And Paris Hilton’s contribution?  Well, she was born with the right genes.  And then there was that ‘accidental’ flash of her vajay-jay.

Wonder which of the two is more famous…hmmmm….something to ponder.

The upside, I guess, is that now, rather than people posting video of themselves on YouTube doing nothing in an obvious and desperate attempt at celebrity, they can post of themselves playing Rock Band and being a Rock Star…in an obvious and desperate attempt at celebrity.  That’s progress, I guess.

Hehehehehe…

So now what do you do if you’re Roland Burris and it turns out the man who appointed you is impeached?  And, oh yeah, you finally admit that you did have contact with one of his disgraced aides about the Senate seat, even though you swore in an affadavit you didn’t.

This Illinois political bullshit is almost as much fun to watch as Texas political bullshit.  Only difference is, at least when it comes to the Governor, Blagojevich has bigger hair than Perry.  Not better…just bigger.

You know, I grew up in Texas and thought I had a pretty good handle on political corruption. I mean, it was Texas, after all. It’s all bigger and better and badder in Texas.

Sadly, this morning, Texas is an also ran when it comes to political corruption. As baffled as I am that Americans would elect Shrub twice, I’m just as baffled that Illinosians would elect Rod Blagojevich governor twice.

This morning, the man was arrested – along with his chief of staff – for allegations of corruption so staggering it makes me want to fucking vomit.

Allegedly, this blow-dried piece of dog shit managed to get an $8,000,000 funding grant for Children’s Hospital in Chicago. He then told the hospital CEO that the CEO needed to cough up a campaign donation of $50,000 to insure the delivery of the eight mil. When the donation didn’t come, Rod is on tape – fucking on tape – asking how he could legally walk the 8 mil back.

Give me my dough or I’m cutting off the kids? I mean, I hate kids but come on, are you kidding me?

And, oh yeah, he was selling President-Elect Obama’s senate seat. Again, on tape asking people for money…allegedly.

Also thought about appointing himself, the U.S. Attorney alleged, so he’d have access to more money for when he got indicted.

And the biggest jaw-dropping moment? Blagojevich has been under investigation for years and beginning about 8 weeks ago, he started pushing harder. Why would someone who’s already being looked at try and drag in even more money? Because there is a new ethics bill in Illinois that takes effect January 1 that bars certain kinds of donations.

“Better get our share, boys, before them damn do-gooders fuck up our machine with their damn ethics bills and Pollyanna attitude.”

Now the question is: how hard are the right-wing whackos, the same ones who fervently believe Obama’s birth certificate is faked, going to try and tie President- Elect Obama to this nightmare?

Some days, I just want to buy an island in the tropics somewhere and hook my computer up to a generator. Then I could sit back, drink Mai Tais, and write all day long.

Ahhhhhh…..

120 days since….

But I’m retiring the clock.  It was a passive-aggressive way to get someone who probably never reads the damned blog to pay attention to some vague promises they made and then ignored.  And yeah, they used the weakest, most bullshit ridden reasons I’ve ever heard to ignore those promises.

Passive-aggressive is good…unless ain’t nobody paying attention, and in this case…ain’t nobody….

Also, I believe that, Bush’s economy and the massive recession we’ll face in 2009 and the first part of 2010 (and longer if the private jet flying auto CEOs can’t pull their collective heads out) will absolutely slam the door on what this clock was counting.

There are always writers who whine about not getting book deals.  There are always writers who whine about other writers (usually referred to as hacks) getting great deals for putrid books.  There are always writers who believe they are being left behind even in vibrant markets.

Truth in writing here – I am absolutely one of those writers.  I’m always guilty of those sins.

But the point is that over the next couple years, I fervently believe there will be no vibrant market.  There will be, in fact, damned few books deals going ’round.  Sales at nearly all of the major chains and many of the independent book stores would have to rise dramatically just to be considered in the toilet.  When people are concerned about losing their jobs and getting medicine for the baby, they buy fewer books and no one can tell me any differently.  LuAnn and I have the same income we had a year ago and two years ago and we – bookstore owners – are buying fewer books!

It’s been ugly for a while, it’s getting uglier, and there will be lots and lots of great writers whose voices you won’t hear for a few years when it comes to novels published by a major house.  But maybe that means the small press, which I’ve always loved and supported as well as I could, will take the place of the behemoth publishing houses, just as small specialty car companies will replace the dinosaur Big Three.

Anyway, this was all to say that I’m bagging the Countdown Clock.

Or maybe I’ll find something else fun to count.  Hairs left on my head…length of my toenails…how many Sudoku games I’ve played….

We’ll call him Ronnie and he first came to my attention a couple weeks ago.

A Spring Valley copper called me and said he’d found this kid walking across the bridge over the Illinois River.  Seems the kid was walking home from Illinois Valley Community College, which is in a town called Oglesby.  Ronnie had walked from IVCC to the bridge and the southern edge of Spring Valley.

That’s nine miles.

We’re not done yet.

Ronnie was headed out toward Seatonville, fully prepared to walk that entire distance…another seven miles.  So the Spring Valley officer gave him a ride.

We’re not done yet.

The copper called me and said Ronnie was headed west on Route 6, did I have time to give him a ride further down the line?  Yeah, that was no problem.  It was dark, it was starting to get cold, and I’m not wild about people walking on the road in those conditions.

Ronnie told me he lived in the High Rise.  In Princeton. That’s thirty one miles from IVCC.

Thirty one fucking miles.

And he was walking.

The next morning, one of the deputies got a call about a man on the road at 2:30.  Five days a week, Ronnie leaves home at 2:00 a.m., walks to school, then walks home.  He’s done it since the semester started.  He needs to go to school, he has no license and no one to give him a ride.  So he walks ’cause he wants to get to school.

Truth in advertising: Ronnie isn’t quite all there.  He’s not stupid and he’s not mentally ill, he just has a touch retardation to him.  The kind of degree that leaves people wildly uncomfortable.  If someone is more retarded, then they can be talked down to and forgotten beneath a sheen of guilt and pronouncements about supporting social programs and donating to Special Olympics.

This kid is mostly there, just off a few degrees.

But this son of a bitch wants his education.  Regardless of whatever wires in his head are misconnected, he knows education is the silver bullet, that education can solve every single problem – EVERY SINGLE PROBLEM – America has, and he wants it so badly he’s willing to walk 31 miles to school every damned day to get it.

*****

We’ll call her Jessie and she first came to my attention a couple of weeks ago.

My wife has a second job and works with Jessie at that job.

Jessie is pregnant.

Not as an accident.  Not as, “Hey, the car ran out of gas and it’s getting cold so we’ll have to hold each other in the back seat…oh, don’t worry about that.”

But as in, “I chose to have a baby.  I chose to complicate my life in ways that I can’t even begin to imagine.”

Jessie is excited about her baby.  She should be.  While I’m not into kids, I do believe that if you’re having one, you should probably be excited about it.  Jessie is aglow with excitement and is reveling in the attention.

Jessie is 17.  Jessie’s no longer in school.  And Jessie is excited about filing papers to participate in WIC: Women, Infants, and Children.

It’s a social program, a form of welfare from the USDA.

Understand, I have no problem with the concept of welfare.  I do believe there are times when people need help.  Decades ago, it was churches that often tried to help but anymore, churches are – mostly – houses of judgment rather than compassion.  So now we have government programs and I generally support them.

But to make that your life plan.  To, with flushed cheeks and a hitch in your voice, inquire about WIC because you have no other plan, is a nightmare.  Jessie’s short-sightedness has left me breathless and speechless.

Maybe Jessie will make it.  Maybe, at some point, she will realize she’s got to have an education.  Maybe, regardless of one or two or more kids, she’ll try and get her silver bullet.

I have my doubts.

I have my doubts that Jessie will ever come close to being Ronnie.  Ronnie, who is self-aware enough to realize he’s not that smart, is doing everything he can to make a life for himself.  Jessie, who seems bright enough, is doing everything she can to make sure her life is over.

And no, I’m not saying motherhood is the end of your life.  I’m saying motherhood at 17 with no diploma, no supportive family (which, if we looked closely enough, is probably the psychological underpinning of the entire baby motivation), and a plan that involves government handouts, is probably the end of her life.

The dichotomy makes me crazy and there’s nothing I can do about it.  One kid walking 62 miles a day to get educated and one kid walking to the local federal office to fill out paperwork.  One has nothing and is working to get something.  Another has – not everything, but quite a bit more than nothing – and is working to toss it all on the garbage heap.

I have no idea here, I have no thoughts to fix this for either party.  This is just something that’s been on my mind lately.

And the last bit of information?  The nugget I’ve been holding back?  Ronnie was kicked out of school a few days ago.  He’s having trouble paying for school and getting to school regularly and staying awake when he’s there.  Seems he’s not getting enough sleep.