I basically quit using Facebook about a year ago, because . . . well, Facebook is awful. So finally I just couldn’t with them anymore. I’m also not a huge user of Twitter, or Instagram, or any of that stuff. Playing around on social media is fun, but to me it’s all just a distraction from the real writing I try to do every day.

Which I don’t mean in the snotty way I know that sounds. I’m just not wired to enjoy writing/posting the kind of stuff most social media gobbles up, is all. But I’m glad so many do like writing and producing that stuff, and are so good at it. Twitter, Instagram, Tik-Tok and the rest can be such a blast to scroll through.

My wife Cat and I are fine. She’s still working from home. Lately, like everyone else, we’ve been following Trump’s impeachment trial–which looks to wrap up today, actually. So that should be fun.

Ugh. Man, have we all been through so much, for such a long time now. It’s all so unbelievable.

But here we are.

Write me to say hello, or anything else you might want to, any time you want to, and I’ll get back to you. Please stay safe, hug your loved ones for me, and I’ll pop up a post here every now and again to let you know how the new work is progressing. Thank you!

(P.S. Everywhere She’s Not is now available for free via Kindle Unlimited. Also, if you’ve read the novel, and found it deserving, please 5-star rate and review it on Amazon–and/or blog about it, have me on your podcast about it, share a link about it on social media, and so on. That’s the sort of thing that keeps a book alive, and nothing else will. So thank you.)

So, you know my mother and father—your grandparents? When their parents were the age you are now, there were black senior citizens walking around everywhere, who, from the very moment they were born, were owned by white people.

Just over 150 years ago—and you’ll probably live to be 100, so we’re not talking about a whole long time here—it was considered perfectly normal, right here in America, for white people to own black people, the same way you might own a toy or a dog.

Black people who were owned by white people were called slaves. Being a slave was the most awful thing you could ever imagine. If you were a slave, the white person who owned you was perfectly free to beat you up, starve you, let dogs attack you—they could do anything they wanted to you, no matter how bad it was.

If I were a white person who owned a black woman, and that woman had a baby, I could, any time I wanted to, snatch that baby right out of her arms, and sell it to another white person. And if the mother slave cried, because she knew she would never see her baby again, I could punch her in the face for crying. If I wanted to, I could tie her to the back of a horse, and drag her through the middle of town until she was dead. And I wouldn’t get in any trouble whatsoever for doing that. It was my right to do that. Because that slave was mine, and I could do to her anything I wanted.

The reason white people felt okay with treating black people so badly is because they didn’t consider black people human beings. If you don’t think of another person as human, then you’ll do anything you want to that person, because you’ll feel like they won’t care how they’re treated the same way you do about how you’re treated. To white people, black people were nothing but things, or, at best, animals, that they could use for as long as they wanted to—and then, however they wanted to, just get rid of.

Only 150 years ago—and after a whole huge war called the American Civil War was fought over it—slavery was finally made illegal. After the Civil War, it was finally against the law for white people to own black people. Black people then had all the legal rights white people had.

But a lot of white people who had owned slaves were very angry about losing the Civil War. They liked owning black people, a lot. They didn’t want that to stop. Because owning other people made them feel so big and powerful.

The statues you see being torn down now are usually of men who fought their hardest to keep slavery from becoming illegal. The purpose of the statues is to broadcast to the world that the people who fought in the Civil War to preserve slavery were good and honorable. And, individually, in their own ways, they may have been. Nobody is all good or all bad. Good people can do terrible, terrible things. And fighting for the right to own other people—no matter how nice a person you might be otherwise—is about as terrible a thing as anyone can do.

When black people go to a park, and just go walking around, they don’t want to see huge public statues all about how great and noble slavery was. And they sure don’t want their children to see those statues. Because they know that the message, It was awesome when your great-great grandparents were owned by white people is a horrible one for their children to receive. So they, and all the people who agree with them—which includes millions and millions of white people—want those statues taken down.

“Black Lives Matter” is just a way of saying that black people deserve as much respect and fair treatment—what’s called justice—as anyone else. And of course they do. No one should have to stand out in the street saying that their life matters. But black people sometimes feel they must do that, because that’s how tired they are of being treated—by mean-spirited individual white people, and by the white-dominated institutions that have always wielded so much power in this country—as if their lives aren’t worth as much as the life of any white person.

And the fact that so many white people, even today, still believe that black lives aren’t as valuable as white lives, is just about the worst and saddest thing there is in the world.

But, you know what? It’s getting better every day. And you and I can help make sure it keeps getting better, by making sure that we treat everyone exactly the way we want to be treated—and that, whenever we see someone, or know of someone, who is treating another person in a way that is wrong or unfair, we just don’t stand by and let that happen. Because that just lets the bad person keep being bad. We have to stand up, and come alongside the person who is being treated unfairly, and take their hand. And then we join with that person in saying to the bad person: Stop. Just stop it.

When I was 9 and 10 years old, my mother was always out on college campuses—San Jose State, Berkeley, San Francisco State—rioting for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. (1967-68 was an extremely busy time for social activists.)

She would come home, barely able to open her eyes, her face all red and swollen and from tear gas. And she always had some gash in her head, or on her shoulder, or whatever. Clothes and flesh torn from falling, stumbling, getting slammed around.

My sister and I would help with her wounds and all—balm here, ice pack there, bandages taped and wrapped wherever needed—and then she’d grab something to eat, or some supplies of one kind or another, or maybe catch a few hours sleep. And then she’d head right back out there.

I used to unblinkingly watch for her on local television coverage of the riots. One time I saw her on TV, wildly fleeing from police pursuit. I was shocked she could run so fast. I was terrified it wouldn’t be fast enough. But it was. She got away.

It really meant something to me that my mom fought as long and hard as she did, in the way that she did. Because in so doing she was showing me—she was proving to me—that there is something in the world worth actually fighting and dying for. And that something is injustice being done to others.

Mothers now in the streets fighting for justice: Your children are watching you. They won’t forget what you’re teaching them, which is how to live a life they can be proud of. Thank you.

Photo basically absconded from the article Global Outrage Grows at George Floyd’s Death, published by Voice of America on June 2, 2020. Here is a recent AP story, Senate Panel Advances Trump Pick to Head Voice of America.

What else is there to say about this?

Good time to be a human-hosted virus. Bad time to be human.

I haven’t seen where anyone else has said what I’m about to (although I have to assume many have: there’s only so much news one can take in), so I won’t feel like I did my job during this phase of our collective lives if I don’t say it at least once.

On Facebook this morning I posted the shortest possible iteration of what I want to communicate:

(I didn’t mention Trump by name, because Facebook has an algorithm that immediately squelches “political” posts by simply not showing them on anyone’s timeline. Because that’s our lives now.)

Let me share with you two brief exchanges that happened in the comments to my mini-meme above. The first response to it was:

Problem is a huge number of at risk are his voters.

To which I responded:

He’s not worried about his base; he knows he can’t win with them alone. He doesn’t want an election, and is planning on not having one. The idiot child Kushner tipped the company hand when he suggested the election in November won’t happen. Trump knows what every dictator (would-be or otherwise) has always known: A population that’s broken is a population you can rule. That’s Oppressive Tyrant 101. And we’re all seeing how that goes from an idea to a reality.

The next comment occasioned this brief exchange between me and one of my Facebook friends:

FB friend: Trump cannot cancel the election. Congress has the authority to set election dates.

Me: It’s not a matter of “canceling” the election. It’s about practically creating so much despair, doubt and confusion about the election itself that he can reasonably claim that the whole process was invalid, such that he MUST stay in power if there’s any hope for the restoration of order.

FB friend: Over my dead body

Me: Yeah, that’s the idea.

Taken altogether, the above pretty wholly expresses all I want to say. But by way of unpacking it a bit:

It’s not that Trump is methodically executing some devious plan to stay in power; his are hardly the premeditated machinations of an evil genius. He runs on nothing but the unfiltered, unrefined, and unconstrained instincts of the born despot. He is always cunning, but never clever.

The one thing, though, of which Trump is dead certain (despite all of his posturing to the contrary) is that he cannot win the election this November. This fact is totally unacceptable to him. Because he knows that the moment he can no longer claim absolute presidential immunity is the moment so many lawsuits rain down upon his head that he’ll never again see light of day.

His survival depends upon him remaining in power. Everything that he does and says is driven by that single, all-consuming imperative.

And how can Trump keep, and even grow, his power? By continuing to do the only thing he’s ever done to accrue and keep power. He can bully.

Trump is as cruel, cocky and rapacious a bully as ever terrified a playground. And he knows well what every bully does, which is that people are as easy to bully as they are afraid.

Fear is the medium in which all bullies work. It is the soil they need to grow and flourish.

It’s for this reason that the coronavirus is the ultimate godsend for Trump. COVID-19 offers Trump the opportunity to foster a depth and breadth of fear that he could have only dreamed about before the disease started rapidly destroying more lives than anyone can count.

And how, exactly, does Trump use the coronavirus to create the fear that he needs to do the bullying that he needs to keep the power that he needs in order to survive? He does the same thing sociopathic narcissists in that situations always do: He spins endless tempests of chaos.

Because—and this is the part I don’t think enough people understand—chaos always begets fear. It’s the necessary predicate of fear. Because to be amidst chaos is to lack control. And the root of literally all fears is being out of control. Falling, drowning, suffocating, starving, watching a loved one suffer and die: they’re all about being out of control of something nightmarish that is happening.

And what is music to Trump’s ears is deep, country-wide fear (along with the flip side of fear, which is anger: our response to fear is always either fight or flight–which is to anger or fear).

Trump is fervidly employing the coronavirus to keep American citizens mired in arguably more chaos and turmoil than they have ever known before. (Even the Civil War had Lincoln; even the Great Depression had FDR. Where such leaders had mettle, Trump has only spittle.) He does this because he understands the relationship between chaos and fear/anger. He knows that the more confused, threatened, insecure, unmoored, grieving, broke, uncharitable, contentious, hopeless and desperate people feel, the larger the power vacuum that creates.

And if there’s one thing power abhors, and always rushes to fill, it’s a vacuum.

And here’s the thing: all of the chaos that Trump is now creating will reach its apex right around November.

Get people out and spreading the virus between now and July; everyone is sick in August and September; people are dropping like flies by October and November.

And that is when Trump will reap everything he’s been cultivating since the day he took office. He has followed the would-be dictator’s handbook to a T. Persecute your enemies. Silence your opposition. Control the media you can; discredit the media you can’t. Dismantle all procedural checks on your power. Surround yourself with influential toadies eager to follow your lead. Install your puppets throughout the government. Give the people who work closest to you maximum responsibility and minimum authority (think Acting Director, rather than Director). Foster a million rivalries. Bend the entire legal system to your will. Drape upon yourself the mantle of being ordained by God, and reward religious leaders for affirming that anointment. Never stop dog-whistling to racists, misogynists, and anyone looking for the implicit permission to bully others the way you do.

Strongly impress upon all who are deeply worried about the survival of themselves and their loved ones, that you, and you alone, are their hero, their hope, their savior.

And finally, should it come to this, decree your country’s presidential election as so riddled with crooked partisan interference that you have no choice but to ignore its results.

And if this final declaration of your unadulterated power causes even the dogs of war to howl and gnash at their restraints, so much the better. For what is more gratifying than to watch others charge into the fray carrying your banner?

Liberate Michigan! Liberate Minnesota! Liberate Virginia! Bring your guns, your knives, your torches! You are all warriors, defenders of the good, the right, and the just! Rise up! Feed upon yourselves! Everybody fight! Defend and destroy everything! We can’t stop your dying—which isn’t really happening anyway! But soon enough we will bring order to this chaos! Vote for us!

Or don’t. It doesn’t matter. Anyone with any brains at all knows that voting is a total waste of time anyway. Our elections are jokes! At this point we shouldn’t even have them.

Thank God Almighty that I am here to lead us out of this darkness.

And I will be your leader for as long as I deign it my duty to do so. And it will be my honor to lead you until I die.

But even that will be a glorious time! For then my son, whom you all know and revere as you do me, will step into my place.

And if you have a problem with that, then you can take it up with any one of our legions of heavily armed, fully-empowered and frightfully organized MAGA Warriors, who would love nothing more than to get your name and address.

Send your son to a MAGA Junior Warrior camp today!

I know that all of the above sounds like childish hyperbole—unless, that is, you’re even cursorily familiar with human history.

Then you know how far down the tyranny track this train we’re all stuck on has already traveled.

Trump needs one of two things to happen in order for him to remain the ever-enraged engineer of our train as it thunders right past November and heads for parts unknown. One is for the coronavirus to disappear, for life to return to normal, and for the economy to start booming again. The other is for none of that to happen, and for Trump to just keep being who he is.

Either way, he wins.

[An addendum, in response to some of the feedback this post has been receiving on social media: None of this is exactly rocket science. Broken, hacked, and crooked mail-in voting, plus extremely unsafe in-person voting locations—not to mention an overwhelming public health crisis, unprecedented unemployment, and non-stop fervently contentious social strife—will be more than enough for Trump and his fully empowered GOP bootlicks to solemnly proclaim that, out of their love of democracy, respect for all Americans, and a desire for national unity, they have no choice but to indefinitely postpone the election.

And Trump knows that the moment he nullifies the election, at least 40% of Americans will rejoice, pumping their fists (and, of course, their guns) to demonstrate their support for the man who would be king.

And, sure, Congress, the Constitution clutched tightly in its fist, will moan and wail to the heavens against this transgression. And it will have the same effect as chickens squawking and screaming when the fox enters their coop, devours their eggs, and then contentedly strolls away.

And, yes, of course I’d love to be wrong about all of this.

Here’s a funny/sad little fable I wrote about what it was like, at least for one woman, one-year into Trump’s presidency: She’s Got This.

Photo gratuitously lifted from the story, published by the Charleston-area ABC affiliate station WCIV, titled, Parking alert issued for Trump rally at North Charleston Coliseum.

In my May 1 post (COVID-19, infant memories & straw bale gardening), I talked about a few memories I have from just after I was born.

Some readers wrote to ask what other sorts of memories I might have from my infancy. So . . . here’s one:

I’m lying on my back in my crib. (I know it was a crib, because mine was . . . exactly the view you’d have looking straight up from the mattress of a crib with white and baby-blue slats.)

What I’m most intensely aware of—what’s freaking me out, basically—is how utterly incapable I am of lifting off the mattress behind me my massive dead weight of a head. The thing feels like a bowling ball that’s barely connected to my shoulders at all. And I’m just . . . stuck with it.

I’m sure I can roll my watermelon head to one side or the other; its roundness makes it already want to move like that. But I’m equally sure that letting my head fall to either side means leaving it that way; I’d never have the strength to pull it back up again. Which would mean being stuck seeing only half of everything. And (basically) screw that.

So I just lie there, looking up at the line of the black shadow cutting diagonally across half the room’s white plaster ceiling.

I remember actually watching that line move across the ceiling.

Babies have a lot of time on their hands.

The thing was, I really wanted to lift my head, so that I might see at least some of what I could hear happening down the short hallway from the room in which I was alone.

I could hear my mother, busy in the kitchen, passive-aggressively banging pots and pans together as she made dinner. I can hear my dad angrily complaining about something (which today I’d guess was his job). Though I’m very much listening for her, I cannot hear my sister. She sometimes sneaks unseen into the room, pinches some flesh somewhere on me, squeezes hard, and twists. So I tend to be acutely aware of where she is.

∼

As I grew older, my head remained pretty dang gargantuan. So much so that, as a Little League baseball player, I had to purchase my hat from the part of the uniform catalog that was for coaches.

In staying with our recent playwriting mode, here’s about how it went one afternoon during my team’s Little League team’s practice:

COACH CRETIN: Everybody shut-up! It’s time for us to order our team uniforms. Shore, what size hat do you wear? Triple large?

ME: I dunno, Coach. Sounds about right.

COACH CRETIN: I’ll say. You got a noggin’ on ya’ like a planet. I should put you out in left field, and just let fly balls go into orbit around your head. Okay, you, Smith. You got an extra-large head. Shore, try on Smith’s hat. [Smith hands me his hat; I try it on.] Jesus H. Christ! You can barely get that hat to balance on your head. What are we gonna do for a cap for you, Shore? Staple one onto your head? Well, give Smith his hat back, before you blow out all of its seams. So what the hell are we supposed do for a hat for you, Shore?”

ME: I dunno, Coach.

COACH CRETIN: You know what we’re gonna have to do? Order you an adult size hat, that’s what. But that’s gonna cost you extra, Shore. Make sure your mother knows that. You make sure she knows your cap is gonna cost extra, on account of you having a head that looks like it escaped from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. You tell her that, okay?

ME: You bet, coach. I’ll let her know. Say, why you’re at it, why don’t you also order my jockstrap and cup through the managers catalog? My head’s not the only thing on me that’s adult-size. And you tell your mother that I’ll see her tonight.

Okay, I didn’t say that last part. But almost!

Anyway, that’s one of my first memories: lying face up in my crib, staring at the shadow on the ceiling and listening to my family, all while being helplessly oppressed by my medicine ball of a head.

At some point, my mother’s head came looming at me from over the walls of my crib.

Now that was a head. I was completely blown away by the sheer control she had over the thing. She moved her head around just as easily as I spastically flapped my arms and legs around. It was just wondrous to me.

Also extremely noteworthy was my mom’s jet-black hair. She wore it in a 1950’s helmet-like bouffant that to me looked unimaginably heavy. I was genuinely fearful that it was going to drop right off her head and kill me.

I know it sounds like a weird and terrible thing to say, but as an infant I was extremely afraid of my mother. She was a profoundly angry woman, constantly and deeply seething. I can definitely attest to the fact that babies feel that vibe coming off their mother like you might feel the throbbing of a nuclear power plant.

One of the things my mother always said about me is that when I was a baby I never, ever cried. But that was no fluke of nature. I did that on purpose. I never cried because I never wanted to give my mom even the slightest reason to have any more of a problem with me than I knew she already had.

As a baby, my motto was: Stay cute, stay silent, stay alive.

As my mother stared down at me, I looked into her enormous brown eyes, and burbled something that amounted to “Goo-goo.”

She smiled at me.

“Goo-goo!” I said, hopefully.

My novel, Everywhere She’s Not, is in large part about the relationship between a man, David, and his mother, whom, when David was ten years old, disappeared for two years. Here’s an excerpt from the book:

Back inside room 101, David sat down on the edge of his bed, and got lost in remembering a moment from his childhood.

* * *

He was sitting on the edge of his parents’ thrillingly gigantic bed. His mom was standing at her closet hanging up some of her clothes.

He is planning to crack his mom up—with a joke he thought of.

He starts off with an innocent, “Hey, Mom, guess what?”

“What, sweetheart?”

“During recess at school today, I hit a home run.”

Busy with her clothes, his mother remains silent. But he has prepared for this very contingency.

“Do you believe me?” he says.

“Of course I believe you. Why wouldn’t I believe you?”

Nonchalantly, he says, “Oh, just checking.”

He kicks off his shoes, and scoots backwards on the brown and gold paisley bedspread. Once in the middle of the bed, he flops down onto his back.

“What am I doing right now?” he says to the ceiling.

“You’re lying on the bed,” says his mother.

Lifting his head, so as not to miss her reaction, he delivers his payload. “I thought you said you believed me!”

He wasn’t really expecting his mom to laugh; the most he usually got out of her was a smile. But that never kept him from trying another joke later.

More than just about anything else in the world, David wanted to crack up his mother.

And this time it worked.

While looking right at him, Georgia let out a loud and deep laugh. The power, the volume—the bass of it—took David by such surprise that his own laughter was snatched right out of his mouth.

He sat up on the bed and stared at his mother, as if her laughter was a sound he’d never heard before. Then, laughing harder than he’d ever laughed in his life, he fell backwards on the bed, his hands on his stomach, his feet kicking the air. His laughter blended so completely with hers that, for a fleeing moment, it sounded to him like they weren’t two different people laughing, but one.

See also: Mother’s Day for the Rest of Us

Oh, wait. Murder wasps.

So, yeah, that’s definitely the right word.

Have you watched that video of a murder wasp full-on murdering a mouse? Don’t. Because I did. And now I’m seeking a good trauma therapist.

Helping me remain positive in the meanwhile is the straw bale gardening my wife Cat and I have recently undertaken. Garrulous and gifted gardening guru Joe (“Joe Gardener”) Lamp’l says straw bale gardening will work. So we’re giving it a go. Because we know Joe knows grow. (We’ve also read the main book by the guy who invented straw bale gardening: Straw Bale Gardening, by Joel Karsten.)

We’ve started off with ten bales.

I won’t bore you with how to actually go about straw bale gardening, because there are so many great online sources for that. (The Joe Lamp’l link above is a terrific place to start.) But it’s really simple.

In a nutshell: You buy straw bales (from your local hardware store, feed store, farm supply place, farm, etc.), and put them virtually anywhere (porch, driveway, in the middle of the street: it doesn’t matter what’s beneath them). Then, over the course of two weeks, you sprinkle nitrogen on the top of each bale, and water that nitrogen in.

By “nitrogen,” I just mean any fertilizer that’s high in nitrogen. We’re using this pretty inexpensive stuff, from Home Depot:

(See that “29-0-4” on the bottom right of the bag? The 29 is the nitrogen number. The first of those three numbers, which you’ll find on every bag of fertilizer, is always nitrogen. So, you can see that this product is heavy on the nitrogen. That’s what you want.)

You soak your bales every day, and every other day (before applying the water) you sprinkle half a cup of high-nitrogen fertilizer on the top of them. You do that for two weeks. That’s called “conditioning” your bales. Once that’s done, the bales are ready to host anything you’d plant anywhere else in your garden. Seeds or starters. They’ll all take right off.

The combination of nitrogen, carbon (being the bales themselves), water and sunlight makes the straw inside the bails compost into what amounts to young soil. It gets real hot in there; composting occurs; the soil gets created; you let that soil cool down; you plant. That all takes a mere two weeks.

A conditioned bale is two things at once: the soil (which your conditioning has created inside the bale) and the container of that soil—being the straw surrounding the soil. It’s like . . . chocolate ice cream served in a chocolate cup!

We are ten days into conditioning our bales. Right now the outside temperature is 55 degrees; inside each of our bales it’s about 90 degrees. So we know our conditioning is working. (To get that temperature reading, I stuck a long-stemmed compost thermometer into our bales. But a meat thermometer does just as well.)

Some of the advantages of straw bale gardening are:

1. No weeds. (No weeds! What else do you need to know?) Also no soil-borne diseases.
2. It’s a lot less money and work than is building and filling raised garden boxes.
3. The bales are pretty tall, so don’t take much bending to work on. Great for old folks, people with bag backs, wheelchair folk, etc.
4. After a couple of seasons, your straw bales are superb compost. Zero waste!
5. You can put your straw bales anywhere. All around the world, people who are living where they either have no room to garden, or where the land is too toxic to garden, are gardening in straw bales.

The SBG movement is pretty substantially changing the world. It’s allowing people who can garden no other way to become super gardeners. How awesome is that? (Straw is just a by-product of such cereal crops such as barley, oats, rice, rye and wheat. So, for a lot of people, it’s free to get. And you know how you can get all the free, high-quality nitrogen your bales can take? By peeing. So . . . you know. You can have no money at all, and still straw bale garden like you’re the Jolly Green Giant.)

Plus, I mean, let’s face it: this isn’t the worst time in the world to be growing your own food.

You gotta have something to give the Murder Wasps when they come knocking on your door. (For some reason I’m guessing they like beets. But who knows?)

In a couple of weeks I’ll let you know how our bales are doing. If you’d be good enough to add to my cursory treatment anything about straw bale gardening that you happen to know, please do, in the comment section below. Thank you!

I hope this finds you and yours feeling well and staying healthy.

Literature-wise, I cut my teeth on plays. My father was an avid amateur actor in the San Francisco Bay area, and I grew up reading him his lines. By the time I was sixteen, I had read a ton of popular plays from the 1950’s through early 1970’s. From there I read Chekhov, Ibsen, Odets, Ionesco, Albee, Miller, Beckett, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neil–and, always and forever, Neil Simon. And Shakespeare for my next three thousand lifetimes, which won’t be nearly enough time to appreciate half of that other-worldly genius.

I myself have never been able to resist writing in play form, even though I know people aren’t generally used to reading stuff presented in that fashion. (And yes, I have written a full play. It’s called Speak of the Devil, and is unlikely to ever be performed, because its two main characters are Satan and God—and the Satan character curses. A lot. In his final year, my father read the play. He said, “This is an extraordinary work. But too many fucks in it, yeah? Directors will have a hard time with that.” Others have told me the same thing: take out the swearing, and we’ll produce this play. But in what world does Satan not curse?)

Below is a mini-mini play of mine, titled My Whole Childhood in Five Minutes. If you’ve read my novel Everywhere She’s Not then you will recognize some of the dynamics at play here. This is written in the style of . . . I don’t know what you’d call it. Ionesco meets Beckett meets Spongebob Squarepants, or something like that. It’s more allegorical, I suppose, than strictly literal. It’s . . . mega-realism. I dunno. I write these things the way they demand to be written, basically. This one’s of the artsy variety. Hope you like/get it. I’ll more than understand if you don’t.

[The curtain rises on the SHORE FAMILY: DAD, MOM, their 11-year-old-daughter LUCREZIA, and their seven-year-old-son JOHN. Their evening supper has commenced. The year is 1963: the culture jam between “I like Ike” and “I like major hallucinogenics.”]

MOM [to DAD]: How was your day at work today, honey?

JOHN: Oh, pretty good, thanks for asking. You know how it is: reading, writing, whatever the heck fractions are.  It’s all so boring you wanna hang yourself from a tetherball rope—but whaddaya gonna do? [MOM and DAD stare at their son as if he were from Mars.]

LUCREZIA: You should have let me drown him when he was a baby.

MOM [to LUCREZIA]: I like him better than I do you, Fatty. [To DAD] Anyway, honey, did everything go all right today?

DAD: Whattaya’ want from me? Sure. Everything went fine. Perfect. Wonderful. Couldn’t be better. Now, do you mind if I eat my dinner in peace? I can’t talk anyway. I’ve gotta save all my strength to cut through this pork chop.

LUCREZIA: Here! Look what I do! [She grabs the meat off her plate with both hands and furiously gnaws on it.]

MOM [after a moment silently staring at LUCREZIA]: I had a good day today. I discovered that—

DAD: Get your elbow off the table, son. You’ll never go to college and get a good job if you don’t stop eating like an animal.

JOHN: Unless I majored in zoology, right? Then I could probably get a degree just for eating like an animal. Man, I’d get a PhD if I learned to eat like a frog. Have you ever seen a frog’s tongue? How’d ya’ like to eat with one of those things? Wouldn’t it be a drag to be a frog, and go for a fly, and then just forget how to rewind your twenty-foot-long tongue so you could store it in your head again? Then you’d just be sitting there, surrounded by all this tongue. Then you’d see another fly, so real quick you’d try to ball up your tongue, and just throw it at the thing. But your weird frog arms can’t handle that. So then you start starving to death. And—

DAD: Will you please clam up? What is the matter with you? I swear, it’s like trying to eat next to Soupy Sales. Except he’s actually funny.

JOHN: Well, sure he is. He’s named Soupy Sales. It’s like naming your kid Bozo. If you wanted me to be funnier, maybe you should have named me, like, Chuckles. Or Boom-Boom. Or Spanky! Spanky Shore! Automatically hilarious!

DAD: Shut up. Shut up right now.

JOHN [chuckling to himself]: Toodles. No—Squishy. Squishy Shore!

DAD: That’s it. You’re grounded.

LUCREZIA: Yeah! You’re grounded!

JOHN: What? Why am I grounded? How is it my fault that Squishy Shore is a funny name? Also funny: Ditzo. Or Dippy!

DAD: Why are you like this?! I’m telling you right now to shut up. Do not say one more word.

MOM: Now, dear. Remember what the doctor told you about your heart.

DAD: Livin’ with this goddamned kid, I’ll be lucky if I live to fifty.

LUCREZIA: Yeah. You’ll be lucky if you live till you’re twenty-five.

JOHN: He’s thirty-seven now, Lu. I mean, c’mon. That doesn’t exactly take fractions.

LUCREZIA: You’re a fraction!

MOM: Now, now, children. No arguing at the table. Let’s just have a nice, quiet dinner, shall we? Your father works hard every day, and we should all just . . . [She stops, and rolls her eyes skyward.] What’s that? What? [Pause.] Come in, Venus. This is Rhapsa, Keeper of the Earthen Flame. [She closes her eyes.] I can hear you now. Go ahead.

DAD: Oh, great. Time for another episode of Looney Tunes.

JOHN: Except Looney Tunes are funny.

MOM [back from her trance]: Oh, my children. My dear husband. I bring such wondrous news. The Overseers from the basin of the Helix Sea on Venus have informed me that I am soon to begin the Purification of the Final Incarnation. How I have yearned and hoped for this day, when I would be declared worthy to take the 7th Step to Cosmic Nirvana! Is this not a miraculous revelation, my beloveds?

[They all stare at her in silence.]

JOHN: Yeah, mom. That’s really great.

DAD [throwing his napkin down on the table]: Well, that’s it. I’ve got a son who can’t shut his mouth, and a wife who talks to Venusians. I’m outta here. [He exits, returning almost instantly with two packed suitcases.] Good-bye, kids. I’ll call you, probably, as soon as I get a phone in my new place. Try not to end up in jail.

LUCREZIA: But what about me, Daddy?

DAD [kissing her]: I love you most of all, Tubster. I’ll miss you whenever I think of you at all. Same with you, boy—but less. Adios!

[Both children jump up from their seats and throw their arms around their father.]

LUCREZIA and JOHN: Don’t go! Please! Don’t leave us alone with her! She’s insane!

DAD: Stop it. Let go of me. Listen, kids, I’m sure your mother will be much more normal when I’m gone. Now, good-bye. I love you both. We’ll do fun things on weekends, or whatever.

[DAD exits. From offstage we hear a door opening and slamming shut. JOHN and LUCREZIA seem to melt onto the floor.]

JOHN: [slowly reaching out to his sister] It’s you and me now, Lu. We can make it through this together, right?

LUCREZIA [kicking at his hand]: Wrong, loser. Try to touch me again and I’ll break off your hand.

MOM [coming downstage while looking skyward]: Hello? Yes, yes, I hear you. May the light fill you, oh Enlightened Ones. Please, tell me what I must do in order to fulfill your purpose for me here on earth. I promise you that I will obey.

[While MOM, eyes closed, is listening to her voices, JOHN, who has again reached out for his sister, hesitantly pulls his hand back to himself. Both he and LUCREZIA slowly curl up into the fetal position.]

[Fade to black.]

Remember yesterday, when I said that today I’d write about my thrilling foray into the wonderfully wacky world of straw bale gardening?

I did that because to me every day now is Wedmontuefrisathursunday.

To my wife, Cat, however, yesterday was an Actual Friday. Because she is now working from home. (And I do mean working. Cat’s weekdays all go like this: Wake, coffee, work, breakfast, work, lunch, work, 5 p.m. walk around the block, work, dinner, work, sleep. Whereas my days go: Wake, coffee, eat, watch TV, sleep, wake, eat, do stuff in the yard, drink beer, eat, sleep, wake, walk around the block with Cat, eat, watch TV, have a drink, wonder when Cat will divorce me. So our days are the same, give or take.)

Anyway, today the two of us are out in the yard, mainly building a giant new garden box. So I can’t do the post about the straw bales, because right now Cat is outside holding a shovel with my name on it.

What I can do, though, is share with you this “Ask John” column I wrote for our local newspaper. If, back in the day, you read my stuff, you might recognize my reasoning here.

Thanks for the love some of you have shown my return to blogging. That encouragement–the shares, the comments, the cash I presume you’ll soon be sending me–mean (jokes aside) a great deal to me.

I hope that you’re having a great Wedmontuefrisathursunday.

Here’s the letter I got in, followed by (duh) my answer to it:

Dear John:

I know that these days it’s a bit like saying, “I stomp puppies,” but I’m a Christian (of the Methodist persuasion, to be precise).

Like many Christians today, I’ve lately been questioning some key aspects of my faith that, having been raised a Christian, I always just assumed were true. I’m writing in the hopes of getting your input on one of those questions.

At John 14:6, Jesus says, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Might you advise me on how those words could be understood to mean anything other than that Christians, and only Christians, are admitted into heaven?

Believe me, I hate the idea that no one but Christians can go to heaven. But without ignoring or dismissing Jesus’ words here, how can I possibly believe anything else?

Sign,

Hoping to learn

Dear Hoping,

First off, let me just say: Yikes. For verily is writing about religion in a newspaper read equally by liberals and conservatives like playing hopscotch on a minefield.

But whatever. It could have been worse. You could have asked me about politics.

So, the quote in question is: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Now, I am no theologian. But I can read English. And nowhere in those words does Jesus say anything about who does or doesn’t qualify to come to “the Father” — that is, to get into heaven.

Saying “No one comes to the Father except through me” is a long way from saying, “Only Christians can come to the Father.”

To be sure, Jesus, like a bouncer outside of a nightclub, is being clear about the fact that you have to go through him to get inside. What he’s not saying, though, is by what criteria he’s determining who gets in, and who has to wait outside in the cold (or, you know: the heat).

Maybe to gain entrance you “only” have to be a good person. Maybe you have to like dogs. Maybe you have to be wearing red sensible shoes. We just don’t know. We can’t know. Mum’s the word.

Perhaps elsewhere in the Bible, Jesus does explicitly state that only those who believe in him get into heaven. I’m going to guess not, though. Because, as I’m sure you know, John 14:6 is the go-to quote for evangelizing Christians. It’s their strongest, as it were, closer. If Christians had a clearer, more explicit quote to use about the exclusivity of heaven, I am sure they would use it. I would.

But you see my point about this quote. My saying, “No one gets into this Moose Lodge except through me,” isn’t the same as my saying, “No one gets into this Moose Lodge who isn’t a Moose.”

Because maybe I’m letting in Elks. Maybe I’m letting in Elks who are dating Moose. (Mooses? Moosi? Mice? Curse you, English!) Maybe I secretly favor straight-up Rotarians. Who knows? Virtually no one: no priest, no pastor, no Pope. Because I’m keeping that to myself.

It definitely seems to me that, insofar as your conviction that only Christians get into heaven is based upon John 14:6, you can worry not a whit about letting that conviction go.

If your thing is fidelity to Jesus’ words, then, for my money, you can’t go wrong with something he was explicit about, which was loving your neighbor as much as you do yourself. If you’re going to hang your hat on something Jesus said, make it that.