Buddy, can you spare some time?

Looking for readers/reviewers for this short story. It's loosely based on a story a dear friend told me in 2008 a few months before he died from MS. Please give it a read.

"United"

I disagree with this Op/Ed from May 2020. This isn't years away.

Mango Mussolini wants it right now.

Hear that sound? That's Putin clapping. His fomenting of divisiveness via his Useful Idiot has exceeded his wildest dreams. That other sound is the Right's Saint Reagan spinning in his grave.

A poem about quiet

This has never seemed more appropriate:

Keeping Quiet

Now we will count to twelve

and we will all keep still

for once on the face of the earth,

let's not speak in any language;

let's stop for a second,

and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment

without rush, without engines;

we would all be together

in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea

would not harm whales

and the man gathering salt
would not look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.

Life is what it is about...

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with
death.

Now I'll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

- Pablo Neruda, from Extravagaria

Malcom Nance: The Plot to Betray America

Not only is Malcolm Nance a former Naval Intelligence officer, not only can he speak five or is it six languages (including Russian) but he was driving to the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001 the day the terrorist attacks happened.

I got chills at the 30 minute mark.

Just the fact, ma'am

Morbidity and mortality are NOT the same thing. Not even close. It's used in medicine and economics. There's morbidly obese and there are comorbidities. For example, a patient can have cancer and heart disease at the same time. The morbidity rate in a population is NOT the same thing as the mortality rate aka the rate of death.

 The greatest fear the CDC and WHO have is because we have no national healthcare in America (unlike every single post-industrial nation on earth, including Mexico and Costa Rica) there are a lot of Americans with comorbidities. We have for-profit healthcare just like we have for-profit education. Americans are expected to pay for everything from congenital heart disease to a fractured leg, even if it bankrupts them.

Viral load refers to the amount of viruses needed to infect someone. Simply put, the more you are around someone who has an active case of Coronavirus, the more likely you are to develop it. SARS, which sickened 5,300 people in China in 2002-2003 had an extremely low viral load. Viral load has been the focus of hundreds of medical papers over the years.

Novel. In virology the most frightening word is novel. In medicine novel means new. It means: we don't know what it will do inside the human body. Virologists don't yet understand why some patients who never smoke, are 30 years old, jog five times a week, eat healthy food, etc. may develop pneumonia and die from Covid-19 but a 50 year old who is sedentary never does. Novel is scary. Novel means, despite initial gene mapping, they still don't know why children under 12 are highly unlikely to develop any symptoms at all.

Recently, our Orange Führer allowed his boyfriend, Vladimir Putin to perform a publicity stunt ... in the middle of a pandemic. Putin sent a cargo jet of "supplies" to Kennedy International. A Russian oligarch who has bragged about poisoning and murdering people sent us "supplies". This same Russian mobster sent members of his FSB to "help" Italy while they suffer through a plague that has killed 16,400 Italians so far. In case you don't know, FSB is the re-incarnation of the KGB. FSB sent money to Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan and a bunch of other GOP jackasses via the NRA. That's right, money travelled from Russian mobsters through the National Rifle Association directly to elected American politicians.

So two things are really scary right now. One is the word novel. The second is Russia. If you think the Cold War is over then you have never heard of Richard Preston or read The Demon in the Freezer. 

Hoarding guns, bombing down the street in your gas sucker, and hating your neighbor because he's brown is exactly what Vladimir wants you to do right now. Now you're truly vulnerable.

May you live in interesting times

We now know there is no bottom in the despair and stupidity generated by Comb Over Caligula. This failed reality TV host knew the epidemic was coming as far back as December 2019 but he was too busy playing golf at his shitty resort in Florida to care. The head of the Seattle Flu Study knew it was here.

It didn't matter because the current GOP administration in their mad rush to "make federal government small enough to drown in a bathtub" had fired the Pandemic Response Team in 2018. Specifically, John Bolton did this at Trump's behest.

This isn't our Orange Führer's Hurricane Katrina, it's the death of whatever sort of middle class might have still existed in our broken land. There is no Houston Astrodome big enough to save us.

We are all living in Calcutta now. There are only rich Brahmans in limousines and desperate poor people in depressing tenements and cardboard boxes begging for change.

 Never has so much fear, absolute selfishness, and bigotry existed in one morbidly obese rapist. He has told the poor, uneducated whites of America what they wanted to hear so often he's deified in fundamentalist Christian circles.

We are the country that puts 12-year-old children from El Salvador in cages because they dared come here seeking what every single Irish, Italian, Dutch -- pick a European ethnicity -- came here for in the 1800s and early 1900s: asylum.

In a matter of days we will be the country that allows the elderly, people with MS, the disabled, disabled veterans, anyone unlucky, to die. All for our pointless unregulated capitalism and it's eternal state of flux between boom and bust.

The last time I took a gander at the Big Red Map of Death the world had exceeded a half million confirmed cases. We're set to double that by the end of next week and America is the new Italy.

Italy has over 92,000 confirmed cases as of today. And over 10,000 dead thanks to a mortality rate between 4 and 6-percent. A lot of them are not elderly men who smoked. Quite a few were 20-50 year olds in moderate-to-good health.

We.

Are.

The.

New.

Italy.

Defining women

Defining a woman becomes complicated when one ceases to define her on the basis of gender assigned at birth. When experience varies so much from woman to woman, blanket statements fail. Though I am not an expert on gender studies -- and I hope to keep my opinions fluid -- I arrive at a definition of womanhood by looking at men: what they do, what they have, and whom they prevent from doing and having. I define womanhood by who suffers for not identifying or presenting as male, and why.  -- Hari Nef, Twitter, Dec 2015

The Potato State

Like I always said, nothing in the Potato State except skinheads-n-inbreds.

The bastion of White Flight looks extra stupid these days.

St. George, Part 2

My friend George lost his housing in Houston, Texas last year in July after an extended hospital stay. After several months in and out of the VA Hospital, getting robbed of his phone, nearly losing what little he had left after his eviction, George landed in a "long-term" transitional housing place.

George got his heart medication and head medication (he is bipolar) straightened out and was teaching himself code writing online at the housing place.

Abruptly, one month away from getting a housing voucher for a one bedroom, he was told to leave the transitional housing place no explanation given.

Right now George is bouncing around in some emergency shelters, which are crowded, noisy, not always safe and impossible to sleep in.

George is three months younger than me and will be 54 in September. He suffered a half dozen heart attacks several years back, partly due to inherited heart disease and even with a positive attitude he is physically fragile.

Like me, George's parents and most of his relatives are dead and he also has no spouse.

This is what America is like for those of us singletons who are sole bread winners. Zero safety net.

Please donate to George on his PayPal site here.

Two Thirds

Oh, why does this not even surprise me a teeny tiny bit?

How Student Debt is Worsening Gender & Racial Injustice

Fucking brilliant!

No, the sexbots won't save you

Been a while since I visited Feministing and this article in response to the Toronto mass murder and Ross Douthat's ass-hat essay is dead on.

Marginalized people who society frequently ridicules and presumes incapable of desiring or of being desired — fat people, disabled people, people of color, trans and queer people — have not created online communities to plot violent revenge against women. It is only white, straight, cisgender men — who are repeatedly told by our culture that theirs are the only desires that matter, that they are entitled to power over other people’s bodies — who react in this way.

Jess Fournier's entire essay can be read here.

 

Did you fall and hit your head

I've joined a dubious club. I'm now a member of the Head Injury gang. On President's Day weekend while walking home from an exercise class I slipped on some black ice. Technically, it wasn't black, it was clear as glass and coating every outside surface on the morning of Saturday, February 17.

I didn't just fall, I did a Jerry Lewis pratfall. For a millisecond I was airborne floating to the frozen pavement on my back. I have no memory of hitting my head, only sitting up with my ears ringing, my scalp stinging and my ass and legs in someone's driveway.

I was dazed, very tired but nothing else was off. Until the next morning.

I got up at six on Sunday, did some chores, cleaned a bit before the next planned exercise class. But I have no memory of cleaning or doing chores. Nada. Before 11:00 am everything is a black hole. I remember standing in my living room calling my friend for, what she said was, the fifth time in 20 minutes.

At the hospital I fell asleep, on the ER bed, on the CT scan table, etc. I couldn't remember where I worked or my boss's name. I couldn't remember my friend and I visiting a club the evening before.

By Sunday evening 90-percent of my memory had returned. But still to be betrayed by that most vital of organs.

A month on, I still have vertigo/dizzy spells. I still have to sleep at least nine hours a night. I'm still hyper sensitive to light. I still get weird headaches that start behind my eyes and feel like my head is filling with sand.

But still ...

Repeat after me

Rape is not sex
Rape is not sex
Rape is not sex.

Rape is the opposite of sex.

Rape is not a consequence of too much alcohol or too little clothing. No Kevin Spacey, rape is not a predictable end result of any sexual orientation. Rape is not epidemic because we have somehow lost genteel society. Rape is a felony. Rapists are criminals and they should go to prison just like bank robbers or murderers. Rapists do not have a lack of gentlemanly training. This isn't 1805 and it's not about failing to offer a lady a handkerchief at the formal ball.

Rape is an act of violence, not sex. Rapist feel powerful when they attack someone because they tend to feel powerless in their everyday life.

If the allegations against Harvey Weinstein and Roy Moore are true, and the evidence is preponderous, neither of them needs counseling or a forceful chat with the HR department. They need to go to prison.

Sorry, Bill Maher, Harvey Weinstein doesn't need to "take better care of himself", lose weight or shave more often so he can "get laid." This is not about getting laid because rape is not about sex.

Rape. Is. Not. Sex.

Rapists are not sexually frustrated. On the contrary, rapists often are married and/or already have partners they are sexually intimate with. Some even have families with children. And, as the research in the eye-opening 2012 documentary The Invisible War showed, the majority of rapists are serial rapists. In criminal psychology, serial rapists have a lot in common with serial murderers. Serial murderers often begin their criminal careers as rapists. Rapists, exactly like serial murderers, look for opportunity, they look for victims who presumably will be easily overcome and subdued; someone small, someone drunk or impaired, someone young and inexperienced in self defense, someone disabled or unable to run or fight, someone alone, probably someone female.

Rape victims do not get raped because they a) went to the wrong party, b) walked down the wrong street, c) got in the wrong car with the wrong friend or d) left their handgun at home. Victims get raped because a rapist rapes them. Period.

Lumping Senator Al Franken or Louis CK in the same box with Weinstein or Moore is idiotic. Neither Franken or CK are felons. They are stupid, they abused their power but they are likely not rapists. The two women who had the unsavory misfortune to witness Louis CK masturbating in front of them were not raped. They were shocked, scared (because women are conditioned to anticipate odd behavior as a prelude to violence) and later, probably furious. But they are not thankfully rape victims.

Again, Weinstein and Moore are criminals. The former has millions, an entertainment empire, power and people to find and arrange rape victims for him. The latter was so pernicious a pedophile and stalker of teenage girls he was permanently banned from an Alabama strip mall by security guards.

Where it gets confusing -- the conjunction between assaulting a 14-year-old girl behind a restaurant and flashing a coworker your penis -- is called Rape Culture. It's a term that often runs in the same sentence as the War on Women. If you think, like most on the political right, that the War on Women is fictitious then you've never heard of the Congo. Or Yugoslavia. Or the Pink Taxis of Puebla. Or ISIS. Or Jyoti Singh. And on and on the list just keeps getting longer.

Men like Louis CK make the mistake of assuming women are just here for their sexual entertainment because Rape Culture has told them over and over for decades that they are. Every time a hot blonde is strewn across the hood of car in a commercial, every time a video game player has the opportunity to "rape" a character in Grand Theft Auto and every single time there's a televised beauty contest, women are objectified. Objects are things, not people. The first step in suppressing any group of people (African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants, etc.) is to make them into stereotypes or caricatures and then objects. Then it's okay to rape and kill them because, Rape Culture tells us, they're not really people.

Our current sitting president attempted to dismiss claims he is a rapist by suggesting one of his victims wasn't hot enough. In the past, he's emceed and produced beauty contests. He is currently married to a former model who's primary resume point is her ability to look fuckable, to fit a stereotype, a pornographic caricature, to be a thing. I suspect, in his narcissism and selfishness, our president sees nearly everyone around him as just a thing.

We cannot stop rape until we learn to discern the difference between men behaving badly (Franken and CK) and rapists (Weinstein and Moore). We cannot dismantle Rape Culture until we dismantle the toxic patriarchy which has been telling us for ages that women are not people but simply things to be: won, earned, bought, possessed, impregnated, discarded, stereotyped and scorned (dumb virgin, slut, conniving whore, gold-digging bitch, etc.).

We cannot stop rape until we see women (and alternately LGBT, brown people, immigrants, etc.) as people. We cannot stop rape until we stop dehumanizing people.

Kitty porn

Just in time for the winter solstice.

FREE stuff out there on that there Kindle thing

Starting today, my award-winning short story THE WAR WITH CANADA is available for FREE on Amazon Kindle. I also have FREE Audible (US and UK) downloads!!! Leave a comment with your email for the promo code and listen to a top-notch professional voice actor. Always grateful for reviews. Thanks!

Starting today, my short story SOME DEMON is available for FREE on Amazon Kindle. I also have free Audible (US and UK) downloads!!! Leave comment with email addy for the promo code and listen to a professional narrator read one of my stories. Always grateful for reviews. Thanks!

Some Demon

Some Demon narrated by the wonderful Dave Liloia is now up on Audible. Give him a listen. All of my narrators are just mind-blowingly good!

A quadriplegic woman gets help from a supernatural being to free her from the grip of her neglectful relatives.

The War with Canada

My short story, THE WAR WITH CANADA, which placed in the 2012 Bridport Prize anthology UK, is now up on Audible as well as Amazon Kindle.

If you want a free code to download and listen to the amazing Virginia Pettis read this award-winning short story, all you gotta do is ask. Send me a comment on here with your e-addy and I'll fire one off to you.

Not Reading Women Authors

The under representation of women authors in publishing and the debate between "Literary" fiction versus pop fiction are not new. Something happened a few months back that reminded me that Life Is Not Fair. And for folks slugging away at day jobs while their chosen art withers, it's flat-out mean.

I've been writing since grade school. I started getting singled out for praise by English teachers when I was 11. By the time I was in high school, teachers praising my writing got me bullied. In the 1990s, while in college, my leftist opinion column in the student newspaper got me stalked by fundamentalist Christians and other male critics who thought it was their job to shut me up.

Today in 2017, oh how I long for the days of unwanted attention and minor fame.

I took matters into my own hands back in 2015 after years of throwing away hard-earned dollars on entrant fees to: The Missouri Review, The Bellingham Review, Tin House, Fish Publishing, The Boston Review, Zoetrope and dozens of others I can't remember the names of. I did the obscure indy, indy publisher thing (Soft Skull Press). I did Project Greenlight. Twice. Back in 1997, I even "took a meeting" with a Hollywood producer by phone while living in a converted garage next door to meth dealers.

I was turned down by online publishers as soon as they sussed out I was a "woman" author. In summer 2012 I submitted one of my short stories, Object of Desire, to RedFez.net. I created a profile and listed myself as female. The rejection was quick and condescending. Several months later, after creating a fake profile for "Darren Kennedy" of Boston, Mass., I re-submitted the same story with a different title. RedFez accepted "Darren's" story in less than 48 hours. This is not new. I've been experiencing the gender apartheid of the literary world for years.

NOT your enemy.

Now I'm on Amazon, the pulp market where all writers go when they run out of contest entrance money and patience. The trouble is, including non-fiction, Amazon publishes roughly a million titles per month. Your fiction writing doesn't drown on Amazon, it disappears under the waves without so much as a ripple.

A year after publishing my short story collection, in between working one full-time and one part-time job, I started on the hamster wheel of self-marketing. I got a Twitter account. I harassed my handful of friends on Facebook for reviews. I got my yoga studio to put copies of my book in their lobby.

And neither is she.

 And then I read about a former instructor of mine in Seattle. I want to emphasize: he's a nice guy. I enjoyed his class and he had a wonderful collection of stories gleaned from years of reading The New Yorker. He turned me on to Lorrie Moore for which I am grateful.

He's published two novels, sold the film rights to one and done readings all over the country. His Amazon author's page is a sea of positive reviews. Last I checked, his first novel has over 29 five-star reviews.

My first thought when I saw the plethora of reviews was: How? Did he pay them, buy them lunch, dog sit? Did his publicist have sex with them?

But then he is a man. He is white. He is hetero, has the prescribed two kids and a wife. He's also about 15 years younger than me.

Here are some other things he has that I do not: a bachelor's degree from a prestigious eastern college and, of course, he has an MFA. He has run workshops, one of which I attended. He teaches creative writing in public schools part-time.

In 2012, I tried to get a job as a front desk clerk at the same writer's collective he teaches workshops at. It was answering phones and directing people to the right classroom. Over 170 people applied for this front desk job. They picked a young, white guy who was finishing his MFA to answer the phone.

A while back, this nice guy, this published author, won an artist's grant for $10,000. He had been applying for it for several years. He was interviewed in a Seattle weekly paper. He talked about misconceptions people have about published authors, like how they're all rolling in dough. He works multiple part-time jobs here and there but they are in his chosen field -- a luxury I've never come close to experiencing. He then mentioned that the ten grand would not cover a year of child care for one of his kids.

I can't even wrap my head around the sum of $10,000 but then I've been using food banks to fill my fridge off and on for several years. Every other week I have to decide what to do with five pounds of raw cauliflower, a bucket of cottage cheese and no garlic. Recipes, anyone?

I want to not criticize, but Jesus-fucking-Christ-on-a-cracker you won a literary artist's grant during a time when over half the bookstores in America are gone, most publishing companies have disappeared, fiction readership has sunk to a new low and MFA applicants like this young woman are saying they don't want to become "beach read" authors. In fact, she would rather go unpublished than become airport fiction, popular literature, or the ultimate put-down, "chick lit."

Well, fuck that.

After decades (I'm 51) of working endless temp jobs to keep a roof over my head, I'd happily join the ranks of E. L. James or Stephenie Meyers. I'd give my left tit for one-tenth the financial success that either of these women have achieved just to be able to pay off the inch-deep stack of bills on my desk, move to a nicer apartment or, quit my day job and become a for-real writer. Who cares if they write about sparkly vampires or four-hour sodomy sessions. The point is, they're writing and they have readers. They have enough readers to fill the convention center in Seattle to overflowing. In the end, pop fiction writers are doing what all writers, if we have half a brain, should be doing -- they're getting their stuff read. I will never jump on the Hate Wagon for James or Meyers. They understand that writing, like everything in our consumer society, is a business and they're good at it.

I suspect 20 years from now, nobody will remember my former instructor or his two published books. Holographic screens, direct brain feeds, whatever we're using in 2037, will not carry his writing. But people will know who the two most hated female authors of the last 10 years are just as we know of Charles Dickens. Or Harper Lee. Or Danielle Steele.

Or Jo Rowling.

If you're a man and you write book reviews and/or you're a published author you don't need to be a misogynist to keep women shut out of literature. You probably don't have a bigoted bone in your frumpy Hipster body.

If, like my former instructor who won the grant, you have a daughter, you probably have contemplated the idea that her life might be a tad harder than yours. The hurdles and obstacles laid out for her may be more numerous and higher than the ones you've encountered. You'll contemplate this possibility ... and then you'll forget about it and go back to re-reading David Foster Wallace, Brett Easton Ellis or Jack Kerouac. And you will continue to unconsciously do what you've been doing all along: not reading women authors and, by example, encourage others to do the same.

Thirty minutes of your time

Four of my short stories are available on iTunes and Audible right now. If you'd like a freebie code to download and listen to any of them, please comment on here and include your email address so I can send the code. In return, I just need a 20-word review on Amazon or iTunes. Your pick.

GATOR COUNTRY

BRAVE SUCKER

THOSE LITTLE DEATHS

LAND OF NOD

GATOR COUNRY and BRAVE SUCKER are narrated by the straight-shooting John Tambascio. THOSE LITTLE DEATHS was narrated by the crazy talented Virginia Pettis. And LAND OF NOD is narrated by the king of cool narrative Phil Martin.

Suffice it to say all of these voice actors have made me reluctant to ever read my own writing again. They're that good.