Lucy

You always know it’s coming. But that doesn’t make it any easier. Yes, she’d been slowing down lately, showing her age, but that just meant she’d take short breaks while playing full-bore fetch for hours at a time. After all, she’s Lucy!

She’s the one who welcomed me back to America on sunny afternoons in the yard. She didn’t care that I owned a total of four shirts and had no idea what to do with myself. She was always there, a calm companion, smiles and play. I was just looking for a room where I could pause for a few months, but instead found a home with Manny and his two dogs, Sam and Lucy.

When I first moved in I didn’t know what I was doing and would put the dog gate across my door when I was trying to work. Lucy would come check on me, standing politely outside. I’d been there a month before I changed my mind, waving her in while I stood up to go move the gate. But she’d just been humoring me, and vaulted that fence from a standstill like it was nothing at all, landing gracefully and coming to say hello. Tail wag. Then turning and effortlessly hopping over my silly barricade again.

A couple times I came home to find garbage strewn across the kitchen floor, an impromptu indoor beach of coffee grounds. Sammy, the other hound of the house, would be grinning and wagging his tail but Lucy would be in the corner, ears down, refusing to meet my eye, shame in her every line despite the obvious truth that Sammy’d done all the mayhem (breaking the lock we’d put on the cabinet). Looking back and forth from his grin to her sweethearted penitence I would have the hardest time maintaining a stern facade.

And when I moved out of that house, bringing some floor coverings to my new apartment, I would find tumbleweeds of Lucy hair blowing around an apartment she’d never seen. I was sad when that stopped.

And the day I bought a new coat for a trip to Amsterdam with Lady L, we met Manny and Lucy for brunch and my dignified coat came away well-patterned with shepherd hair. But that’s what happens when you can’t resist getting down to hug the beast. Idly picking them off on Nieuwezijds Burgewaal made me smile as they drifted off among the tram tracks and bicycle tires.

A couple years ago I wrote a post about Lucy's habit of coming in to say goodnight to me. She was still thriving at the time but understandably it sounded to some like an obituary, and I remember thinking “Nope, so glad it’s not that, yet.”

But now it is. It is that. It is time to say not goodnight, but goodbye.

I’m not good with loss. The invincibility of death still overwhelms me with the terror of permanence. It doesn’t seem real that something I care about it just...gone. Over. Not coming back. I feel that now for a dog I knew. A dog I miss.

Goodbye Lucy.

I'm just gonna keep Thanksgivinging

So...how’d it go? Anybody get in screaming matches about TrumpCo? Mashed potatoes remashed against the glass of family portraits that were hung in a tidier time? I wonder how many people gave thanks for their orange messiah, hearing the voice of salvation in what sounds to me like the scream of a descending warhead.

But the fact remains that in most of the world the falling warheads are only metaphoric, and I’ll give thanks for that every day it’s true. And acknowledge the species-shame of the places where it’s not, watching for and thinking of ways to expand our decency to all. And it’s not an answer, but let’s take a moment, a swirl of tea steam and a scratch on the dog, to send empathy and love and peaceful intentions to Syria and all the other places our tax dollars and global structure are killing people.

Man it’s hard to say a complete thought and keep it positive. It’s like trying to sing with a cold coming on, starts up fine but keeps ending in a splattered ball of phlegm.

Speaking of lunch, we’re having it together today, a large portion of my family and I. Not all, siblings and an uncle are missed, candles for the ancestors, but I will happily see the ones I can. And stuffing is as good as I remember it.

Stuffing, that would be a rather cakey mush if we ate it more often, but in its alternation it retains its savory dignity. And dangit, guess who’s headed for another Trump Darkness metaphor? It was an accident, I swear! But maybe hope and progress shine brighter after we’ve looked in the face of quotidian despicability in the same way that stuffing is best after months of Something Else. Fine, it’s sloppy, but you see what I’m getting at.

Did I mention how much I love cranberry sauce? And peace? And hope and optimism? And the chance to meet the refugees, the kind people whose caricatures might otherwise seem scary? And the smiles of friends as we tie in to ropes, buy each other beers, or watch the puppy play? Friends are volunteering, driving to Standing Rock, donating to causes any soul must adore. Dogs laugh through smiles and birdsong is still a song. It’s all just so good. Even when it sucks.

And at the end of the day, when the faceless buzz of People seem so sinister, I can sit back and savor that I only actually know a couple assholes. That’s fantastic! So many good people, any and all of which deserve love and affection. Even the jackwad who climbs with his bluetooth in and only wants to insult Hillary. Even that buttnugget.

And then this blogosphere thing. A place that sometimes has absolutely terrible taste, but is a sort of e-mud with gold nuggets richly scattered throughout. And when I see your familiar title show up in a post, a ‘like’, a comment, it will be be just one more thing for which to be grateful.

I have nothing new to say about Black Friday, so I’ll just hold on to this Thanksgiving idea. Let’s try 365 days straight, shall we? Happy endless Thanksgiving, my friends!

In the power of a Moroccan madman

Marrakesh. Cooler at night.

We needed to get to the train station and the sign on the Marrakech bank said 46° C. My boiling brain calculated for a second...115°F? Yup. No, no way my ex-girlfriend and I were going to walk two miles across concrete oven streets in that. Time for a taxi.

One problem. We’d stepped out of the bus station a few days before to watch the only taxi in sight be chased off by a crowd of shouting men banging on the windows and throwing shoes at the windshield. The taxi drivers of Morocco were on strike.

I believe in unions and collective bargaining. I believe they’re among the essential tools for the progress of our species. But as the sign clicked up to 47°C I was glad to see a strike breaker cruise past in a beat up old Hyundai. My ex climbed in back, I took the passenger seat, and away we went.

We were at the tail end of two months in Africa and had been on a few taxi rides that were, shall we say, exhilarating? Even among a cast of maniacal rides, this one stood out. Hoping to escape the notice of the striking cabbies, he took vehicular madness to a whole new level of cuts and swerves, traffic lights are only decoration, and wrong way on a one-way street, all at the poor little Hyundai’s maximum velocity. The brain-addling heat can’t have helped (AC? hahaha) and it being the middle of Ramadan so he hadn’t eaten or drunk anything since dawn probably didn’t help either.

In situations like that I’d learned to just sit back and relax. Nothing to do about it. Fretting and tensing up were useless, and they say that only adds to your odds of serious injury anyway. So I just sat back and observed to see if we’d survive the ride.

We did! To my delight, we arrived at the train station intact. I paid him and climbed out into the sandblasting sunlight. The second he pulled away my ex broke out with “What was THAT?!?”

“Probably a new record for crazy,” I laughed some precious moisture into the air. “He was an even worse driver than that guy in Dar Es Salaam...”

“No! I don’t mean his driving. I mean what was the deal with that head wound?”

That whatnow? From my passenger seat perspective I’d missed what she had been staring at the whole time. Apparently the guy had a large open wound still leaking bodily fluid from the torn flesh that stretched across the back third of his skull. Oh. I hadn’t thought to check that before getting in.

The ability to sit back and accept the reality of the moment is essential, both in travel and normal life. But even though I tried so hard to stay away from Trump for this post, and the looming danger for America that’s about to break, this, as with everything else, is caught up in the imminent danger of his presidency.

Because when you’re speeding across Marrakech in a taxi driven by a head-wounded madman, it’s kinda too late to do anything. You’re not going to wrest the steering wheel away from him. And to be honest, I don’t think we can wrest the wheel away from the Alt Right either. Not yet. But this is not a time for acceptance. Not a time to sit back and wait to see what form the suffering may take. This is a time for active intervention.

Oddly enough, Morocco was having elections at the time.
Each box represents a party/candidate.

Because this is not normal. This is not my America. This is not something to just accept. I don’t know how to oppose it, and I ask your help in finding ways, because we as a nation are much worse off than unsuspecting passengers in the power of a skull-cracked whacko. Our lunatic has a cabinet of human vileness for an executive branch, a compliant legislative branch, and a vulnerable judicial branch. Oh, and the nuclear codes but no understanding of diplomacy or the realities of the world today.

So no, don’t sit back and wait. Let’s help each other find ways to do better than that. Complacency is for safer times.

(An easy one, if you believe in the core American values of freedom of expression, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, right to clean water, the government’s responsibility to protect and respect its citizens, all that good stuff, and/or you don’t like when police spray protesters with water cannons in freezing temperatures, and you have a Citibank account (or TD, Mizuho) you can tell them you don’t like what they’re funding. It’s easier than you think to switch banks, and money seems to count more than votes these days.)

Something unexpected and totally normal happened today

I was well into my lineup of questions and answers, ordinal numbers and time sequences in class today, blue marker and red marker, hoping my students were getting something out of my antics when something unexpected happened.

She’s maybe three years old. She has the brightest eyes and incredible laughing smile, and she’d lost one of her shoes somewhere. She plays for most of my English class, blocks and panda bears, while her mother learns at a truly incredible pace, moving rapidly from knowing few words when she got to America two months ago to now, when she helps me teach the other Arabic speakers.

But the little one eventually gets bored and wanders off. She loves opening and closing doors, usually with herself on the other side, and the entire office knows her name and laughter, and soon someone will bring her back, a smile on their face, and deposit her at the table where she’ll look around, find her mom, and exclaim with the purity of a child’s joy “Mama!”

She’d snuck out during my lineup, somewhere around “Who arrived third to class today?” and I was just writing “Who got here next to last?” when she popped out from behind my white board easel with a giggle. Someone had given her a multicolored abacus, and she proudly presented it to me, setting it up with a three year old’s precision then stepping back to make space for my admiration and looking up as if saying “Can you believe this incredible thing!?”

And it was. It was an incredible thing. Because there I was on a Friday afternoon in Oakland, every cell in my body feeling heavy with the ominous portents for my country’s future, but here was this little girl, a Syrian refugee who had been through hell without even the words to name the horrors, and she was giggling up at me and presenting an abacus for my enjoyment.

It was something unexpected, and yet absolutely commonplace. I am privileged to spend some afternoons with these people, these incredible, beautiful human souls, and though the ostensible reason is so I can give them more English words and usage, the reality is that they give me hope, gratitude, and a love for our species that can be hard to grasp in the screen-shaped world.

So yes, I’m terrified for our country, but absolutely, I am confident in the human spirit. I am confident that we will continue to move forward. And I’m confident that we as America will continue to make this the kind of place people like this wonderful little girl and her mother want to come to for safety and a better future.

Hands Around Lake Merritt

Was election night as bad as it gets, or is the worst still to come? That sick feeling of disappointment, of alienation from your nation, of watching a big part of my demographic identity declare itself in direct opposition to everything in my mind, spirit, soul... Yeah, Tuesday sucked.

But faced with that question, if the worst is still to come, I just can’t find my optimism. He appointed a known white supremacist as his chief advisor! I can’t wrap my mind around that. We have a president who wants neo-nazis at his right hand. And Americans are cheering for him. It’s...disgusting.

All last week was trying to keep the spine straight, the head above polluted water, clinging to the emails, texts, and conversations of support and shared awareness, but even when those come from around the planet they feel small when the world at large has gone insane.

Then Sunday. A beautiful warm autumn afternoon in Oakland, when an estimated 10,000 of my fellow Americans gathered to surround Lake Merritt with a message of peace, opposition to bigotry, and dedication to the ideals that made America great in the first place.

My mother, awesome woman that she is, took us to an anti-War protest for the first Gulf War, and I’ve found my way to a few others over the years, but this was the first time I’ve seen thousands of people united in somber silence, peace signs held up in the air, saying without words that we as a country are better than what our “democracy” puked up on Tuesday.

Oakland has seen nightly protests of broken glass and tear gas as small numbers of people manifest their opposition. But this was something altogether more inspiring. Children played tag on the grass, dogs in sweaters, neighbors sharing food and hugs while everyone from old school Berkeley hippies to post-Millennials (have they named them yet?) shared a space and a message.

God it felt good. Restorative. Reassuring. Fortifying. There are four long years of resistance to (let’s be honest) evil ahead of us, but there are a lot of kind and genuine souls in my peaceful army, and I have faith in us. I found my optimism. They gave it back to me.

I want to stop there. But I can’t shake one other feeling. Nor should I. It’s fear, not for me (entirely insulated by my privilege and status) but for the children of America, the minorities of America, the refugees and the immigrants of America, all the vulnerable of America. So many groups are threatened by Trump’s inhumanity, but on Sunday they came together in one little boy. The demonstration was dissolving by then, everyone heading home for dinner, and I felt wrung out. Not ready for the pain of seeing a child having cause to ask this question.

This is not who we are. This is not who I will ever be. And you and I both will do everything we can to protect this child, won’t we? I’ll see you on the barricades if we have to, because this child deserves to live in a country where he never has to ask this question again.

Figuring out how to live under a Trump presidency

This is not the blog I was planning to post.

After the initial wave of Denial, the “No way America would ever elect that” came the other stages.

Anger. “Those idiots wanted a protest vote against The System, but they’ve sunk the country instead of making their point in a way that would actually work!”

Bargaining. “If we give him a fair chance, don’t oppose everything, maybe he’ll retreat from his platform of insanity and merely be a Republican.”

Depression. That one occupied most of the last two days. Yesterday I discovered at 1:30 in the afternoon that I was still in my bathrobe.

And finally, Acceptance. “The office of the President demands such gravitas and dignity that he’ll shed his lunatic-candidate facade and become a grown up. He’ll act for the nation’s best interests. Because what kind of monster could have that power and abuse it so flagrantly?”

So I wrote up a nice optimistic post of acceptance and brotherhood. Compassion for the voters who have been left behind by the political system that listens to and thinks about only the wealthy, and confidence that we as a nation are stronger than one terrible president.

These are not the words of an intelligent person

But then I got up this morning and saw that Trump’s choice to head his EPA transition team is a well-known climate change “skeptic.” Climate change (in addition to being agreed upon by basically the entire scientific community and every developed country except us) is something the majority of Americans agree is happening, and is a problem.

So what did Trump do? He chose a climate change denier, clearly showing the same truth that’s always been blazingly clear about him: Donald Trump does not care what Americans think. That’s the nature of a narcissist, the beliefs and perspectives of other people do not factor into his thinking. That is not a president.

And a corollary of that is even scarier. Donald Trump does not care that his violent rhetoric of hatred is dangerous. This is the one of the things that keeps me up at night.

After the Brexit vote, which was far less explicit in its endorsement of racism and xenophobia, hate crimes in Britain rose 40%. That is truly troubling.

And might that happen here? It already is.

Those people who voted for a change from The System chose to endorse, justify, and encourage the racism, misogyny, homophobia and intolerance in our country, and innocent people are going to suffer for it. (And the same goes for those who did not vote, or gave Trump their “protest” vote via a third party candidate in any swing state.)

I’m a big fan of respecting other people’s opinions. It’s one of my core values. But Trump Brand Bigotry is not an opinion. “Mexicans are rapists” is not an opinion. “It’s okay to grab women by the p***y” is not an opinion. They are moral deficiencies. They are dangerous failures of the mind, soul, and character, they are outrages against the ethics and humanity of this country, and I will not respect them. Ever.

I want to preach cooperation and healing. I really do. But this person, this disgusting narcissist is not someone I can cooperate with. Maybe I’ll get there, maybe he’ll prove me wrong. But right now? He is not my president. Democracy is not something that happens every four years in a voting booth, democracy depends on the people of a nation standing up for what’s right every day of every year. So that’s what we should do.

I don’t know how to oppose Trump yet. Smashing the window of a local business as my fellow Oaklanders are doing tonight does not strike me as an appropriate response. But as long as Trump is what he has always been, I will oppose him in every way I can find.

Trump won. Now what? Dear god, now what?

What do you do when your country elects a racist, misogynist, morally bankrupt unsuccessful businessman as president and national humiliation?

Breakfast of the terrified. With yesterday's
tea bag from when the world made sense.

Well. I don’t know about you, but I had ice cream and wine for breakfast.

What next? Beats me. I’m tempted to stock up on canned goods in preparation for civil war. Or just start drinking. My brain keeps suggesting the names of countries around the world not populated with racists, misogynists, xenophobes etc. Or maybe I just give up hope for this country, it was good while it lasted, and laugh while the whole thing burns.

I find myself waiting for an FBI report to come out saying “Russia rigged the election! Don’t worry America, you ARE better than this!”

But no, time to face facts. Trump won. Against all reason or logic or moral consistency, Trump won. So how could this election be a good thing? There has to be a way. Some light of hope. A couple ways come to mind.

Even the Republican Party knows how awful Trump is. If they have any shred of decency left, they’ll oppose him from within. That could reclaim the GOP for sanity. For the principles they claim to support, but have strayed away from. They played a dangerous game when they harnessed the power of racism and ignorance through the Tea Party, and it’s turned out that they were tying themselves to rabid dogs. Will they cut the cord now?

And maybe it will be the salvation of the Democratic Party to lose this election. For too long the Democrats have been a substandard semi-Republican party. Lapdogs to Wall Street, unwilling to take real positions to improve the illnesses of this country, tax cuts and ignore the poor. Maybe now those political minds will wake up to the changed nature of reality. Stop pivoting and start telling the truth. Which would mean actually pursuing honest policies. That is, find their souls and their cajones. (Hint: look to Bernie.)

Maybe we on the left will demand they be better. Maybe We of the Sane will mourn for a moment, then organize instead of just bitching. And who knows, maybe it would even work?

For too long the political class in this country has ignored the masses and treated them like idiots, assuming they would never get their act together enough to threaten the status quo. After all, democracy is not a threat when the elite chooses the candidates. They dumbed us down until we were more focused on American Idol than America.

Remember this one? Paint an orange toupee on that mean fish

But that was their mistake. Because it taught too many of us to vote for the shiny, with no criteria for intelligence or substance. Those on top taught the middle to blame the low, and the low to blame the bottom. But they never expected the masses to demand the lowest intelligence, the most impoverished morality, the (let’s be honest) scum of the nation. The lowest common denominator, which has been the centerpiece of reality TV for 20 years. It’s only poetic irony that the fool they elected is actually one of those idiotic centerpieces.

Yesterday the flawed system collapsed. I would have preferred the tower had tipped over to Good, but either way, America today is different than America yesterday. The question now is what will we build for tomorrow?

Hillary headquarters SF on the eve of the election

I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, this was the San Francisco headquarters for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, not some cluster of cubicles behind a crossroads gas station. It was three floors of bustling humanity of all ages, colors, shapes, and gaits. And at one point there were tacos.

Truth is, I hadn’t known what to expect when I agreed to make phone calls for Hillary. I had a vague daydream of getting real with some undecided voter, acknowledging that while she reflects some of the problems of our current political system and doesn’t make a great candidate, she’s extremely qualified to be a great president. I wouldn’t even go into how profoundly unqualified Trump is, but if they brought him up, well, maybe I’d offer some anecdote about how the rest of the world (outside of Russia) is terrified we’ll make the wrong choice and the USA has already lost standing because of his campaign, while poisoning our discourse at home. How he’s already doing the exact opposite of making America great again.

Okay, so I hadn’t thought that part out very well. I was counting on the moment to carry me through. Did I get that moment? How did it go?

The fact that finding these quotes meant weeding through
dozens of fake slander quotes is part of the problem.

Well. “You’ve reached the mailbox for 239…Please leave a message after the tone.”

I don’t blame swing state voters for turning off their phones en masse. Just as long as they don’t turn off their brains too.

I talked to a few people, offered help with polling place info and how to get there, though I don’t think I had any effect. But to be honest, that wasn’t my primary reason for going. I was there for a more selfish purpose.

This election scares the hell out of me. Donald Trump embodies the worst elements in our nation, all the racism, sexism, xenophobia, greed, and willful ignorance that stands in the way of our progress towards a better future. All taken to a degree of vileness that I never expected to see in my country, and gaining a level of support that shames me to every red, white, and blue cell in my body.

It’s scary. And fear is worse when you’re alone. I sought others who see the same blazing truth I do and are doing something about it. Whether calling voters is useful or not, these people were not willing to just stay home with fear and crossed fingers, the way I had. I went to Hillary’s headquarters to see the other volunteers. And I saw them.

The college student, next to a lady with pictures of her grandkids his age. Millennials in hipster hats and workers with calloused palms. A wide array of ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds, all responding to the same danger to our nation and our world. I was impressed. All the caring hearts in that building, giving their hours for something we all find important, for no pay or reward.

Except they did get a reward. A couple weeks ago, on a normal Thursday morning, they had an unexpected visitor. Who showed up with a surprisingly small entourage of a couple cars, stood in the small room and talked to everyone, incredibly personable and charismatic, genuinely interested in what everybody had to say. Regardless of the fact that she was standing in front of cardboard cutouts of herself, under a banner with her name, and her status as the focal point of all our hopes for the immediate future.

When Hillary visited those people, she imbued them with an optimism that is precious in our modern day, and especially important in this rancid season of hatred and narcissistic ignorance. And they held onto it, and paid some forward to me. And today, as I post this before heading straight to the polls to vote for Hillary, I need all the optimism I can get.

Good luck, America. Don’t screw this up.

I think I'll go call Florida

I have a friend who’s been phone banking for Hillary. No one’s seen her for weeks. This weekend she’ll be frantically making last-minute calls to swing states to pull for her candidate, and I deeply respect her passion and effort, actually doing something in the face of the looming disaster for America and the whole world that would be a Trump presidency.

But I have to wonder: has any human ever convinced another human of anything? I don’t mean to be gloomy, but if anyone ever has, I don’t think I’ve seen it. We’re not really a reasonable species. Least of all now, when one candidate is seen as irredeemably corrupt because she exists in our current system and the other is profoundly unqualified, unstable, immature, unintelligent-  Sorry, it’s hard to stop that list. The other candidate is….Trump.

But whether or not phone banking ever does any good, I have to wonder: this weekend? Is there anyone left in America who hasn’t made up their mind yet? If there’s anyone with any shred of doubt left, will a phone call help?

I want to find out. I want to see what a political phone bank call is like. I’m thinking Saturday afternoon. I’ll call Florida and ask them “So? Whaddya think?” I’m not going to try to convince anyone. Of anything. But I want to hear the opinion of a complete stranger in a battleground state.

Lordy help us. Battleground states. That was once a very real thing, 1861-1865. And more and more, it feels that way again. Every 2 or 4 years.

When people attack Hillary for being part of Obama's
administration, why doesn't she talk about the facts?

Can we indict the 24 hour news cycle on charges of treason? I’m getting sidetracked. But that’s the theme of this election, where the entire country was sidetracked from the issues. Yes, Donald Trump is a reprehensible human being, and should face charges of sexual assault. And plenty of people want to see Hillary in the defendant’s chair too. But as satisfying as revenge fantasies are, I’d rather we were talking about actual issues.

Wealth inequality. Systemic racism & sexism and how we’re going to ameliorate both. The military-industrial complex and a world making money off bombing Yemen/Syria/Afghanistan/Iraq/Pakistan (Libya? Are we still bombing Libya? How shameful that I can’t even keep track of who we’re bombing?) International trade agreements that benefit the mass of Americans but pose a threat to continued progress, and whether backing away from the TPP would simply allow China to fill the void. Climate change. The fact that we are the only country on Earth still “debating” it as a theory. Nevermind, let’s not talk about that particular shard of shame. You get my point.

If Trump supporters were actual Republicans,
this would matter. (*Only reflects his first term.)

I’d rather talk about issues, because it would be better for the country. Coincidentally, it would be better for my candidate, since she has policies beyond “I’m incredible. Build a wall. Everything’s your fault and rigged. No. Obama founded ISIS.”

So, tomorrow evening, I’m going to try to hear about issues. Will I? Or will I hear periodic character attacks and frequent dialtones? Can’t wait to find out. And then, after a little dip of such demoralizing abuse….I’m going to go get some ice cream.

And maybe a bunker.