JUNETEENTHprideFATHERSDAYrecovery

There is a snapshot of me at about 2 years old, perched on my seated father's extended leg like a jockey on a horse. My hands are held loosely in his. My father’s hair reaches his collar, appropriate for a liberal academic in the early 1970s. He has full sideburns, an audacity that once made my grandmother exclaim, “Why, Charlie! You look like a hippie.” 

We are in the living room in St. Paul next to the antique Danish spinning wheel and clogs my parents took with them from continent to continent on their student missionary travels. On the wall behind us is an explorer’s map of the eastern hemisphere, framed and hung as decoration.

In the old snapshot, I’m grinning broadly as my dad bounces me up and down, singing the French country tune “A da da! Sur le cheval de bon papa”

Sometimes, in the evenings, my father would sit in the basement and listen to his record collection, which ranged from symphonies to choral music to Peter, Paul and Mary and the Beatles. 

When I was eight, my dad taught me the basics of drafting and carpentry—his own fathers’s trade—building a sturdy plywood and lumber playhouse for me in the back yard, complete with a pitched, tar shingled roof. 

My parents had traveled the globe and taught me how to have sincere conversation and share a meal as comfortably with a Hmong refugee from war-torn Laos as with a member of Congress. I was taught which fork to use, the purpose of a caviar spoon, and what to say or not say to a server during a six-course meal. I also learned to eat fried okra with my hands, and how to dig into a pot of fiery hot stewed chicken using a handful of sticky rice as a utensil. 

My father taught me the art of storytelling. My childhood friends and I would beg him again and again to tell us about the time grandaddy Johnson got four flat tires. My family’s oral history was rich. 

The night I came out to my father as gay, he wept and embraced me, not completely understanding what it all meant, but affirming me as a worthy and loved young man.

For all of this, I am grateful. 

I am grateful for my father's simple humility. He recognized his own faults and was familiar with the words "I'm sorry”. 

He taught my five elder siblings and me that emotional vulnerability could be a man's strength, not his weakness. Emotionality was ok. In our home, it was permissible for a man to cry. More than once, my father reminded me that being a pacifist doesn’t make one a passive-ist. 

He was finally felled by the ravages of a disease he passed on to me through genes and by behavior—the disease of alcoholism and addiction. But my father died sober and spent the last years of his life as an active member of Alcoholics Anonymous. I remember, during his fading days, asking my father about the AA process of making amends. 

He told me he was dying with nothing unresolved, no aching wrong unaddressed. He said that forgiveness was an essential part of loving someone, and forgiveness was greatest gift I could give anyone, including myself.

Today I honor him.

The Old Wizard and the Boy

There was a time before our own when the world held a different shape. 

The mountains we know lay beneath the sea. And the place where fish now swim greeted the sun each morning with bushes and fruit trees and the singing of birds. There were towns and rivers like our own, but all scrambled up in different spots. 

Colors were richer then, the fields more vibrant green, the seas bluer. Purple flowers covered the hills and made them glow like satin bedclothes. 

On the highest of the hills, where the rock disappeared into clouds, there was a tower. It was made with roughly-hewn rocks the way it was done in the oldest of old time. The granite had stood through many summers and winters and was worn by wind and rain and sun. 

In the tower lived an old man. He was known as a wizard for he declared himself that when he was still young, when his beard was ruddy and the ends first reached his collar. The old wizard had ferocious brows and a nose that poked out and was bulbous like a drunkard’s. He wore woven robes. His shoes were woven, too. They had pointed toes and seemed impossibly large, like canoes. They shuffled when he walked through the town.

There weren’t automobiles then. So everyone walked, carrying their goods in bags made of fishermen’s nets or as parcels wrapped in crisp brown paper and twine.  

As the years passed, it took the wizard longer and longer to make his way down along the winding road from his tower to the town. With time, his knees grew gnarled, and his shoulders drew forward and sagged as though he was making an apology. Sometimes on the road, he would have to stop and sit on a boulder and catch his breath, his shoes crushing purple flowers and his hands at this sides supporting his weight.

Would that there were a magic spell to relieve this. A metal-bound book of incantations sat on the wizard’s desk and he had leafed through its pages a hundred times searching for a clue as to how to make himself not so old. The trouble was two-fold—the book had spells about turning one thing into another but not one about manipulating time. And anyhow, all the spells in the book were to be performed on another, not one’s own self.

The spells a wizard could use to change his countenance or stride weren’t written in books. They traveled instead on the wind, like the whispers of birds and the crying of lambs echoing from the field below.

The town of Brudanough was in a place that today is the edge of the sea, but in that day was set in a wide meadow. The farmers from all around would bring their livestock and vegetables in carts for slaughter and sale. There were shops for spices and eyeglasses and candies, and the central square of the town bustled with laughter and squabbling every day the grand market was open. 

Into this strode or hobbled the old wizard, genially waving to familiar townsfolk and offering them his brackish tobacco-hued smile. 

Yet the smile was most often a lie. For as the years passed and the wizard slowed, more and more his thoughts were on his rheumatism and more and more his breath took effort.

One day in the town square, the wizard came upon a group of boys playing marbles. They were all in a ring, crouched or kneeling. Their laughter, their shrieks, their concentrative silence, all held appeal. It was the sound of youth, the sound of a holiday, the sound of limber joints and breath easily drawn.

As the wizard passed, his robes swirled with each step like churning sea waves, the hem of his under-trousers brushing his ankles. One or two of the boys pointed and laughed at his get up. The wizard did his best to laugh back, nodding and smiling at the boys as if they all shared some bit of humor and the boys’ laughter had not come at his expense. 

When he rounded the corner on the narrow through-way, he fell against the wall with a feeling in his middle as if he’d just been struck. Oh, he thought, for an incantation to turn him young again, back to the days of marbles and gingerbread and yearning. 

He sighed. His eyes grew moist and his view of the cobbled street blurred. After a bit, he raised his arm and wiped at the tears with the sleeve of his robe.

As his arm fell back to his side and his seeing cleared, he came to be faced by one of the boys from the circle of marble players. He must have broken off from the bunch and followed the wizard. 

The boy was five or six, thin as a carrot, his hair cut severely as if his mother had upturned a small pitcher on his head and cut around the rim. 

“Old wizard, may I ask you a question?” the boy said tentatively, cutting to the heart of things in a way that made the senior flinch. The boy spoke without guile or self-awareness, gently and flowingly as if it took no effort at all. 

“What would that be?” the wizard returned a bit gruffly, his voice sea sand and cowhide. 

“I would like to buy a spell from you, and I haven’t got much money.” The boy reached into the pocket of his patched coveralls and pulled out two small coins. Hesitantly, he put forward his palm. 

“Mm-hmm. So what is your question?” the wizard queried again.

“Can you do me a spell to make extra time?” 

The wizard laughed a bit pitifully.

“The one thing I cannot change is time. Would that I—”

“It’s because of my papa,” the boy interrupted. ‘He’s a farmer; we live on a farm. Every morning before I wake, Mama makes him breakfast and ties his lunch in a sack and he goes out to the barn and into the fields. He’s gone when I wake an gone all the day and when the sun has crossed the sky and set, even then he is still in the barns. Mama puts supper on the table for my sisters and me and I don’t see my papa until I’ve had my scrub and put on my nightclothes and am in my bed.”

“Mm-hmm.” The wizard nodded gravely. “So what spell is it that you want from me?”

“I want a spell for more hours in the day.”

“How’s that?” the wizard asked, surprised at the boy’s grand notion.

“If there were more time, my father could tend the fields and the stock and get home in time for supper and he could put me in bed and keep the cruel river monsters away.”

“Mm-hmm,” the wizard said, his mind moving quickly. He rubbed his forefingers against his thumb and looked down obviously at the coins in the boy’s hand. It was a pittance of money, but over the years of being a wizard, he had learned that it was good to collect a fee. Preferably that sum would be large enough to be dear to the person but not so large as to wipe them out. It was for the paying of the fee that the asker would treat the spell and its wizard with respect and play out whatever direction was given them. 

“I have a spell for you after all, young man,” the wizard said, drawing his eyes theatrically wide. He then paused to see what might be the boy’s reaction.

The youngster just nodded and tendered forth his coins. The wizard clucked his tongue a couple of times and snatched the money from the boy’s palm. 

“I will give you a spell of courage,” he said, inventing as he went along. “But it is not courage to slay a beast or defend the town against a clan of marauding ogres.”

This was a world upside-down from our own but even there ogres were not real but merely the stuff of fables.

The boy nodded sternly, listening. Good, the wizard thought, the fee of two coins was exactly the right price.

“The courage I will give you,” he said, “is the courage to speak where you might not otherwise.”

And with this, he withdrew a small birchwood wand from the folds of his robe and wagged it in the face of the boy with the sway and sharpness of a conductor leading an orchestra. 

Now they were both wide-eyed.

“Abala-zam!” said the wizard, shaking slightly.

“Abala-zam!” the boy repeated, unprompted. The wizard nodded, and tucked away his wand. As he dropped it into his large, baggy pocket, the boy’s coins clinked against the hard wood.

“And here,” the wizard said, drawing closer, “is how you will use this courage. You will speak with your father tonight. You will sit up in your bed until he comes home from the fields and the barn and has had his supper. Then you will ask him if he might tell you a story. But not the whole story, just the very first part. If he asks which story, tell him you want a story that has never been spoken, a new one. Then, tomorrow night you will make the same request and ask him to keep going with the story where he left off. By the third night, you won’t have to ask. Your papa will come to you with the next chapter of the story as a matter of course.”

The wizard waited a moment for a town constable in a tall hat to pass on his horse. 

“Your papa will be very tired from his labor, and you may only get a little bit of the story at a time. It may take years, in fact, for the whole story to be told. But hold on to each night, each thought and twist of the story, and put them in your heart somewhere near your new courage. When you are grown and are a man and you have a boy of your own, you may tell him your father’s story at bedside.”

At this the boy thrust his hands in his coverall pockets and looked at the wizard, his face scrunched to one side. 

“I don’t know, sir. When he comes home, he’s very—“

“Do as I say!” the old wizard cut him off. “You must allow the magic to work. It is powerful magic, and larger than your young mind can understand.”

The boy stood still for a moment, then nodded and scrambled off back to where the other boys were waiting with marbles and jacks.

It had gotten to be late afternoon. 

“Take a ride, old man?” a voice came from the street, startling the old wizard. He looked across and saw a farmer with a cart laden with pumpkins and bags of corn drawn by two slightly ragged horses. “I know you live up the mountain. I’ll take you as far as the base.”

The old wizard prepared to refuse the man’s offer. After all, he was a distinguished wizard, not a common hitch-hiker. Then he thought of his knees and he felt an ache climb his back like a malevolent shiver.

“Very well,” the wizard resolved, hitching up his robe to climb onto the cart. It took a moment and the loss of a bit of dignity for him to hoist himself up onto the flat bed.

As the cart passed the boys, they had begun trudging home each toward his own respective farm. The boy with the new power of courage looked up and smiled winningly at the wizard, who nodded in return. Then the boy’s face changed.

“Papa?” he said toward the farmer, but the farmer had not seen the boy. 

“Tonight!” the old wizard called to the boy as the cart rounded a corner.

The cart rolled on through the outskirts of town and out onto the farm-way. The wizard rode for a quarter hour in silence, gently jostling along. 

Then, something peculiar occurred.

There was no thunderclap. There was no great swell of wind nor tintinnabulation. As the cart lumbered along the rutted dirt farm road, the wizard felt a change occurring within his own body. it was as if he’d had a large cup of sweet, tarry coffee and it was traveling through his veins to his aching knees, his bent back, his feeble lungs. All felt revitalized. All felt new.

His mind was struck by the memory of the boy. It was as clear as if the boy was right before him.

“The one thing I cannot change is time,” he heard himself lament. And then, more roughly, “You must allow the magic to work. It is powerful magic, and larger than your young mind can understand.”

The old wizard drew a deep breath and sat up straight. His knees were a young man’s and when the farmer pulled at the horses’ reins and whistled between his fingers for the wizard to disembark, he climbed from the cart bed with ease.

Even his robe felt more suitable on his shoulders, the fabric gossamer and well-fitting. As the horse cart rolled off, and the sun set, the wizard stood still, feeling every part of him tinging and aglow. A tremendous peace came over him.

Then, the sun was back above the horizon. The farmer sat on the bench of the cart and the bed jostled as the horses drew the contraption over a muddy patch. The farmer turned around to have a look at the old man sitting among the pumpkins and bags of corn. To his surprise, the listing of the cart made the wizard’s stiff, bent form lean precariously to one side. 

“Whoa,” the farmer said, pulling up sharply on his straps to still the obedient horses. He got down from the bench, his boots sinking slightly in the mud, and walked around to the back of the cart. The old wizard didn’t move. His eyes were closed, his expression ashen.

Uncertain what to do, the farmer stood there a while. 

And a voice spoke to him, softly, from nowhere and everywhere at once. 

“When you are grown and are a man and you have a boy of your own, you may tell him your father’s story.”

With that, the farmer walked to the dead man, settled the body between two bales of hay, and headed back to his family and his farm that would someday be on the bottom of the ocean.

What a story the farmer had to tell!

Radio Gaga

I work in the radio station alone, now, during the Coronavirus quarantine. My boyfriend Kevin drops me off most days in my own car then comes and gets me again when I’m done with the show. It’s not necessary in any practical way, this de facto chauffeuring,  but it makes me feel secure. Like a kid being dropped off for school with a lunch packed and crisp ironed clothes. The promise of being picked up after school, air conditioned car, a kindly word, right on time. But I will be exhausted after the radio show, half beaten, half victorious. 

We are the champions, my friends. 

When I turn on the microphone, I wonder if anyone is actually listening. I’m displeased with the moments I’ve stumbled over my words, or told a show guest on the telephone that they’re great when I really find them mediocre and a time-filler. 

No time for losers. 

I often have the wrong thing to say, just the wrong thing altogether, and I press the wrong button and mutter, “Great, Johnson,” sarcastically under my breath and try again and make the same exact mistake again. And then I make it a third time. So I walk out into the sales bullpen, spartan and empty because everyone is home with a mask on or getting drunk. 

I've paid my dues time after time.

I could have been a contender. But I walk into walls. I walk into furniture. I walk through my past and gaze into my future but am seldom right here where I ought to be.

And bad mistakes, I've made a few.

The bullpen smells like fresh lumber and old coffee and office dust. Everybody’s gone, masked or drunk. Maybe both. The carpet is thin, not because it’s old but because it’s cheap. And the waste baskets are overflowing. It’s my doing. I’ve filled them with scripts I’ve printed, and pizza boxes, and other assorted nonsense. First one, then another, and another. Wastebaskets I mean. 

And I walk back into the studio and press the wrong button a fourth time. And I curse. But on the fifth try I nail it, my voice cracks with emotion and I laugh sincerely and the joke I was trying to make works, and I feel like a winner in the moment. And for that little sliver of summer I am not an over the hill actor slunk off to the small leagues, biding my time. I’m vital and here and now. And I wish I could erase everything and revel in this moment all day, but I don’t have the patience for such things. And besides, it’s time to try to say something clever to the weatherman who’s actually pre-recorded but whom I try to animate and bring to life by pretending to interact with him. I’m a charlatan, a circus barker, a cur.

We are the champions of the world.

A haircut instead of food? Yes.

RECOVERY JOURNAL

April 13, 2019

It’s official. I’m in Palm Springs. In the City Council Chamber. My friend is the mayor. He’ll vouch for me. He’ll vouch that I exist. He'll vouch that I exist and was in the City Council chambers and saluted the flag. (That’s all I can really ask for at this point.)

It’s April 13th, but today the thirteenth is lucky, not unlucky. It is a blessed thing. I am sober this April 13th, and it’s a Saturday, not a Friday, all of which portends well. Let us portend, not pretend.

The Dog Days are Over, and maybe they are and maybe they’re not, but in any case, there you go, and here you are. And there it is.

I have about fifty dollars to my name. Am I a fool for wanting to spent half of it on a haircut? No, I’m a fool for other reasons. This is just a faint slice of what is to come.

The Dog Days are Over, and surely they are as long as I let God’s will be my guide and stick with the program. I don’t think it’s God’s will for me to get a fancy haircut or even a plain one, wrapped in not-so-much, but it’ll make me feel better. And that, in and unto itself, is worth something. Worth what, I don’t know. But something, okay? Okay. 

I’m supposed to write a thousand words of substance, not a thousand words of blather. But sometimes blather is what’s in the offing. And sometimes a thousand words is more than I can come up with. Or get down with. Go ‘head now, get down, get down. 

There are people you hear from all the time, and people you just don’t hear from anymore. And sometimes not hearing from them is a blessing. Like Jamie Foxx—not to cast aspersion, but yes, to do so, I suppose. 

So will I spend maybe $25 of the remaining $50 or so I have, today, to get a haircut? Yes, I suppose I will. Not because I ought to. But because, well, I’ll do $25 of Ben’s will today vs. God’s will. Spending a bit (and yeah, that’s a bit of money) today on Ben’s will will I suppose help further Ben at least in terms of confidence and confidants. Though I really shouldn’t. At all. And there you go. But I need to have money to get back to Los Angeles, and money to rent a car, and then drive that car back to Palm Springs, and then drive Uber and get more money and. 

And.

And there you go.

A Delicious Madhouse

RECOVERY JOURNAL

April 9, 1019

The wind blows me here. The wind blows me there. No, it’s nothing so haphazard as that. Good and bad decisions blow me and I giddyup. 

A room of one’s own (along with money) is what a woman requires in order to write fiction in a man’s world. This is what Virginia Woolf wrote and then lectured  in 1929. Who’s afraid of her? Not I. It makes sense. What must a woman (or man, thank you) have in order to write nonfiction in a man’s world or anyone’s world? I’d say a clear hour each day and nobody yelling in your ear, no president braying, soap opera portraying, TV shrink allaying. Who’s afraid of that? I am. 

So, I’ve got this:

A room temporarily mine (and not ten bucks, I tell you) in the West Hollywood Craftsman bungalow of Irving Boomer, who has the best name I’ve ever read or heard spoken. Irv is smart as a slap across the face. He’s a bipolar former modern dancer who studied under Martha Graham and he will tell you about it all day every day if you let him and suffers from the same sort of addiction to crystal methamphetamine as I do, though he refers to meth as “mama’s magic medicine” and not “the devil” as I prefer. He views the crud as a viable treatment for his bipolar-2, both the gut churning depressive episodes and the wild manic turns during which he dons costumes and jetties around the house in peans to Graham and other choreographers whose names are stage-whispered in reverence, though I haven’t heard of a single one of them. All day every day.

The house is astonishing, given to him long about his fortieth birthday by his family as an apology for treating him for decades like a magical wind-up toy. The place is also an asylum to house his nuttiness. Get him a crazy-pad, they reckoned, stock it with furniture and art and booze, extend him a spending account, and he won’t come over any more and embarrass us with our historical negligence or his blossomy excess. They were right. It works like a charm. A decade hence, the house is crumbling and wonderful, every corner of every room stacked with piles of mismatched decadence—laundry from who knows how long, dessert plates enameled with remnants of ancient apple pie, years of the New Yorker, USB jacks and plugs, cleaning products, gardening supplies, sex toys, silverware, doilies and dance shoes. Containers of personal lubricant, automotive lubricant, and dozens of dust-caked bottles of facial and body emollient. Cologne dispensers. Television remote controls. Trivets. Art supplies and bicycle parts, especially pedals and horns. 

You get the idea.

More than anything, there are tools that deal with starting fire and putting it out—lighters, torches, candle snuffers beside smoke detectors that are open-gutted and free of batteries. 

The light-on-fire stuff makes sense. 

This is a house of methamphetamine or was and isn’t currently, don’t be alarmed, dear reader. One generally smokes meth. This is also a house of cigarettes, many many many. This is a house of votives, displayed around the joint on tables and mantles and settees in threes and fours, enough candles to satisfy a decent sized cathedral. This is a house of tea lights to light tea time (which exists here), middle of the night seances, and moments of intimacy. There are torches for creme brulee, plumbing repair, and lighting the living room fireplace. Boxes of matches lie around the kitchen to give the oven and range a kick start. 

Really, it’s a wonder the house hasn’t burned to a cinder. 

There have been many parties in this house, fueled by methamphetamine and wine and rich food, served on platters and platitudes and beatitudes and bad attitudes. Pa rum pa pum pum. 

Let that settle a moment.

At present, the curtains are drawn. There are no parties. There’s just Irv and me. The apple pies are one-offs wrapped in waxed paper that are delivered every day or two from the local deli along with penne pesto or pastor al mole, peanut butter and jelly, soda and seltzer and wine. Irving pays for all of this from the family dole. I, as mentioned, haven’t get ten bucks at present. We’re both sober, me a little longer than Irv, but it’s one day at a time for any alcoholic or addict and all we have is today. Today, and yesterday, and tomorrow, you are likely to find Irving and me asleep, me in the bed and him on the sofa. Or vice versa. We are comatose in shifts. Or at the same time. There’s no rhyme or reason. Just young sobriety in all its inglorious splendor.

The difference, I suppose, between us is that for me, longterm sobriety is the goal and endgame of all of this. Whereas for Irv, sobriety is a lark, a temporary thing to try out, discuss with his friends on the telephone, and later journal about in curlicue script. (Oh—we both write.) 

In the hours that I’m awake, rumbling and fumbling around the house (or The House, as it really does deserve to be called) I’m doing what any dutiful son of parents who loathed packrat tendencies would do. I’m cleaning and going at the piles of excess, sometimes in plain view, sometimes secretly during his long naps in order not to raise his ire. 

To be fair, I shouldn’t throw away anything that isn’t mine, including things from the fridge. Irving, lips trembling with emotion, has forbidden me from discarding anything from the refrigerator including mushy spoiled tomatoes. (It was my preparing to throw away a rotten tomato that earned the warning.) Today, I pushed my luck and tossed a jar of amber colored mayo whose expiration date is a year passed. I know I had better hustle it out to the trash barrels in the back yard before I catch hell.

As I write now, I wait for the dryer to finish another load of his towels and tablecloths and jockstraps. There is a closet in the second bedroom mounded so high with clean and soiled laundry that its window is blocked and the doorways still-life vomits tee shirts and haberdashery onto the room’s floor. 

I can only guess how many dozen loads of laundry this translates into, or how many years its been since the closet floor was visible. I’ll be gone from this remarkable house before all the laundry is done. I’ll have the proverbial ten bucks and a room of my (one’s) own, thanks to a series of voice-overs I’ve been recording during this time of transition. 

But the memory of this delicious madhouse, and my time here, will stay with me for keeps.

All Bets are Off

Wednesday was a big news day. We were intrigued by the celebrity college admissions cheating scandal. There was a Boeing 737 Max plane down in Ethiopia. Our own FAA kept American carriers’ Boeings in the air, and to show confidence, the head of the FAA climbed on board one for a flight.

 Wednesday morning, President Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman Paul Manafort was found guilty on eight counts of conspiracy and given a piggyback sentence which, with prison time he’d just been handed on other counts, amounts to more than seven years behind bars. 

Moments later, New York authorities announced new charges filed against Manafort that would be potentially damaging to Mr. Trump.

Within an hour, a different FAA official (the sudden “acting head”) suggested that new evidence warranted grounding the entire US fleet of Boeing Max planes. President Trump straightened his necktie and jumped on television to address the nation with the announcement. 

The eerily convenient timing of the FAA about-face and Trump’s television address bumped the Manafort story out of top position on the news channels. And it bought Mr. Trump time. At a press conference following his speech, most of the questions to the president had to do with airline safety and Boeing. One reporter did ask if Mr. Trump was planning on pardoning Mr. Manafort.

“I haven’t even given it a thought as of this moment,” the president replied firmly. “It is not something on my mind.”

Of course it was on his mind. And of course he will pardon Mr. Manafort, unless Manafort chooses to tell prosecutors things about Mr. Trump that would jeopardize the president or bring Congress closer to impeaching him, an action House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has publicly discouraged. (There’s not telling why she’s taken this position, as by every indication, she’s a Trump anti-fan and would love to see him impeached.) If Manafort gives Trump-related information to New York prosecutors in exchange for a reduced sentence, he will join the long list of former Trump loyalists who defected Trump-dom and found themselves in purgatory or worse. Trump is all about loyalty and allegiance—not to America, but to him personally. 

But Manafort will not give up Trump. Because he knows he's being pardoned. And Trump absolutely will pardon Manafort. It's gotten too hot in the kitchen for Trump's handlers to allow him not to, even if the optics are awful and it's politically damaging to Mr. Trump. 

About those optics:

The pardon will happen on a Sunday, sometime late afternoon, after the Sunday morning news shows and probably during the afternoon sports broadcasts. It'll be too late for the evening network on the east coast. ABC, NBC and CBS will do a second, updated version of their broadcasts for the west coast, as happens when a big story is developing and a three-hour-old report is creaky and out-of-date. But Fox News, CNN and MSNBC will be in repeats and documentaries for the evening. The story will still get attention the following day, but it'll be a full news cycle old at that point.

The pardon will come just after the New York court finds Manafort guilty of some of all of the charges he’s facing, and will probably be just before a predictable "other" positive news story from the White House. 

If not on a Sunday, it will be first thing Friday before the 8:30am announcement of a favorable jobs report.

Or that’s what would happen in 2019 in a White House running according to expectations and with a savvy understanding of internet/news media and how to promote or bury a story. 

But we do not have a predictable White House. 

The most volatile and (some would say) dangerous thing in the west wing weights 6.2 ounces and fits in the President’s hand. It’s his iPhone X. And it’s connected to the Internet. And Twitter is on the Internet. And while Trump’s announcement of the FAA pulling the Boeing fleet was executed slickly and with marvelous timing, the grown-ups at the White House can’t count on being lucky twice in a row with our president when he has time to stew on things and has that damned phone in his hand.

So all bets are off. More to come.

Dear Hobgoblin

RECOVERY JOURNAL

March 9th 2019

Hobgoblin,

I made this bed and we’ve lay in it for too long, sweating and sputtering, your wickedness slipping inside my blessings. You turn to me and leer at me with dirty, failing teeth and I leer back. I gasp a little gasp and cough. Uh-huh, yeah. 

I squeeze my eyes shut and lie very still. 

I hear you, then, in the dripping of water, in the barking of dogs, in footfalls on the pavement outside 1-2, 1-2. In garbage trucks. In the muffled laughter of the neighbors through the wall. 

You come with false prophesy. You whisper lies, little lies and little lies and big lies. You shout at me in my head until I’m off my head and off my rocker and I rock, cringing, knees tucked to my chest, palms pressed against my ears and you won’t shut up.

You are indecent. You bring me perversions, first fresh then ripe then rotten. Ill-begotten. I suckle your sweet nectar ’til it turns sour, then I keep suckling because I’ve forgotten how to drink anything else.

But I’m starting to remember. 

I will rise from this bed, from this tangle of sheets and funk. I will open the windows and open the doors and go outside. At first I will stagger, then walk, then run. But it can’t stop there. Because when I go on a run, you catch me. Always, every time. And you drag be back to that room of tucked knees and cringing.

I will fly. Man can fly when that which lifts him is a power greater than himself, fly with fingertips spread whistling in the wind. And the wind and the dogs and the trucks and the laughter will tell the truth and I will laugh with the neighbors, laugh with everyone, cry with everyone, be with everyone in exuberant caterwauling congress.

You will hold no quarter then, for the quarter you hold will be that stinking room, the room I have as of this writing left. Goodbye and goodnight. This night, this greatest of nights, I don’t wish you farewell, for you’re not fair and I hope your well runs aching-bone dry. 

Don’t try to follow me. This time, for the first time, I’m not leaving you a trail of bread crumbs. I am up, up overhead. And up is not somewhere you know how to look.

Sincerely,

Benjamin