The Mexican

Multi-ethnic families have a wide range of humor that's either entertainment or weaponry, and like any other family, we use it as both. An old family joke snapped sharply into focus for me through, of all things, an episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, starring an actor I didn't know named Adam Beach. On the show, he was newly transferred to the unit and partnered with Ice-T's character, who naturally assumes he's Hispanic. "Yeah, just the other day some guy asked me if I was Mexican!" No way! Haha!

Growing up, we called my cousin Michael "The Mexican" for growing a cheesy, pencil-thin 'stache that practically begged us to mock it. If attention was what he wanted, he got it. Everywhere he went, we yelled out a chorus of bad Cheech and Chong accents. "Eeyyy, greengo! Whatchoo doin'?" had us rolling around, crying tears of laughter. "Essaayyy! How's it hangin', hombre?" Me and my bro thought it was a funny game, but in their tough Brooklyn neighborhood, a gentle taunt could become a barroom brawl later on, after a lot of beer was consumed. 

His older brother would sneer "Spick" at him constantly, once he figured out that his younger brother could actually pass as Hispanic in some heavily Puerto Rican neighborhoods, which chafed him raw because in his family, he was the outcast for passing as white. It was shocking at times, too, especially during his first growth spurt. He'd go for the annual family Christmas portrait to be asked how long he was in town visiting his own family, like a down-on-his-luck relation come to spend time in the big city after his parents divorced. 

"You know 'Ree (my childhood nickname), I know I come off as some big 'tough guy', but sometimes it really hurts my feelings", and I could totally see why. He'd arrange to meet his family at the local pizza parlor for dinner, only to be asked by the hostess where he wanted to be seated, with his family waving him over from the table they sat at, right in front of the waiter's face. It always felt like a put-down to him; like an unwanted interloper in his own childhood home. 

The Sears family portrait in their living room showed four small, dark people with a giant-sized "white dude" standing behind them almost cropped out of frame, towering thinly above them all. It wasn't a wonder to me, as much as it took me aback, that he'd chosen to identify as Irish-American as an adult by changing his name and marrying a very Irish girl from Staten Island. It was the only place, among all of New York's ethnic groups, that he felt he could fit into, especially in the context of an inherited alcoholism that killed his parents. It felt easier for him to pass as just another Irish drunk.

But when our family got together, or if it was just him and his brother around, there was no question that, like Adam Beach, we weren't Hispanic at all. European....yeah, maybe....and then there was something else that was less available to us on surveys, questionnaires, and medical forms at the doctor's office. That "something" was a someone: his mother who'd left the reservation a long time ago to marry his Jewish father after they met at a corner bar in Brookyln, running from an upstate New York tribe of just 67 people, led by her abusive chief of a father, according to her often slurred telling. No one knew who we were. Not really. 

So, for today: here's to all the "hybrids", "mixed bloods", "mutts", and "half breeds" of the world, plus all the other ethnic blends we have that testify to a legacy of love and marriage in this country that is so distinctly American. This one's for you, cuz. Ironically, after so much separation in their lives, the brothers are the only family they have left, and they remain the ONLY Celtic Jewish Indians from New York I've ever met. Thanks for being Metis like me, before we even knew there was a name for it. And thanks to all the brave actors like Adam Beach for representing a history that so often gets taken away by someone of European descent. I really appreciated seeing our funny ethnic reference on a major network TV show, my brother. It was a first.

Here's to all the other "firsts" out there in the world like me, representing a genuinely original, distinctly American ethnic minority. This time is ours.

Black Robe

Thanksgiving had been co-opted by the party good suppliers, greeting card manufacturers, and mail-order catalogs of the world, and as young intellectuals, we were afraid we'd never get it back. Our generation saw holiday seasons twisted into nightmarish marathons of brutish endurance that wasted our time and money, becoming unruly scenes that would take an army of Dr. Phil's to undo in their individual dysfunctions. 

We watched in horror as people gorged themselves on shopping and bad food, through dystopian scenes shown on our parent's evening news programs that seemed lifted from a scifi movie about the Apocalypse. People were trampled to death during buying frenzies in pursuit of the latest toy craze, like a Cabbage Patch doll. Imagine dying over THAT. Giving thanks in a meaningful way had become supplanted by something advertisers called "Black Friday", as a prelude to a Christmas that was the complete opposite of good cheer.

As we deconstructed the painful pasts of our history books, we talked about how it all went wrong, beginning with an overly romanticized version of the Pilgrims meeting the Indians for the first time, in a goofy portrayal of Northern Europeans as naive waifs somehow caught in a wintertime they'd never met, utterly dependent on the suckling teat of the local, pipe-smoking natives scantily clad in a hippie fantasy of leather headbands and groovy feathers.

It was as preposterously out-of-date as our textbooks, especially to us French Canadian kids who knew better. Their Jamestown was not our Quebecois settlement or Acadian mixed marriage, right off the boat. It was one story about one tribe meeting one group of puritanical Englanders famed for their firebrand of religious extremism that got them kicked out of Merry Old Englande. My ship-faring ancestors came here to trade and mate, hopefully at the same time. Knowing the men in my family, that sounds about right.

By contrast, in college we learned about the First Nations and their territories through the geography of who did what where, at which time. It wasn't as simple as "white man=bad, Indian=good", just a lot more honest, and why not? We were there to learn. After me and my boyfriend made fun of the wacky anachronisms in "Dances with Wolves", we'd tell them to check out a film that's been called one of the most realistic depictions of indigenous life from colonization times that's ever been made into a movie, through the eyes of a French missionary and his Huron allies. Let's just say this: the Mohegans live up to their name.

For Americans lucky enough to have First Contact stories, why not share that over the usual turkey talk this year? Instead of finding an enemy sitting across the table from you separated by a wall you built, you might find family, like we did. Blessings to you.

Apocalypto

Like media stereotypes about the "gentle hippie", Indians have to contend with a full set of deeply ingrained prejudices about every facet of their lives and appearance. Americans love Kevin Costner's white girl adopted by a tribe that bestows upon her sexy Injun magic, with her blow-dried 80s wings sprayed stiffly into place, as yet another annoying anachronism that's wildy out of place with history. But, it sure is pretty! And who doesn't like wolves? It gives you a special feeling!

Of course, media professionals have always been hip to the manipulation in Hollywood movies, which are designed to put you into a emotional space that sets you up (compulsive gambler, drinker, smoker, and/or hoarder) for a major Disney-esque shopping spree, like a supermarket that pumps out smells of fried chicken and chocolate chip cookies baking, fresh from the oven. They're extremely overworked scenarios designed to suck money from your weaknesses and vulnerabilities; an example of greed at its worst.

Enter into this toxic, European-dominated market the real and the true. I'm not a fan of Mel Gibson's public meltdowns, drinking sprees, and weird views about a made-up religion imposed upon him by his far-out, fascist, Aussie dad (notice Mel has Americanized his accent to put him at a distance from his Aussie "Mad Max" days, to sell a franchise of buddy-cop movies, like Madonna in England or anywhere in the world), but he has made some of the best movies I've ever seen in my life, including the entire "Road Warrior" series.

As someone who is very familiar with The Bible and scripture, his movie version about "The End of Days" is one of the best Apocalyptic movies I've seen, including his post-Apocalyptic work set in the aboriginal bush-land of native Australia, as the white folks revert to a bloody, animistic, murderously tribal version of themselves. In his "dog eat dog" worlds, it's every man (and woman) for themselves, and who hasn't had that said to their face by a competing employee (or so they think) while at work? The amount of overly-heightened emotionalism attached to the acquisition of resources makes the common junkie an accomplished liar, and the practiced accountant your white-collar criminal doing time in a minimum-security prison, tennis whites not included.

"Apocalypto" is THE BEST MOVIE I'VE EVER SEEN about the massive die-off of the Mayans, Incas, and Aztecs, that artfully deconstructs the passive Indian stereotype to reveal a band of blood-thirsty savages sacrificing heads to their burning demon in the sky, controlling their crops (as a stand-in for more European concepts about evil and Satan) and their destinies, in justification for murdering their own people, setting them up for the smallpox invasion of the conquering Spaniards who finished the job for them through cultural extinction.

Our hero is a gifted husband and father who is an expert hunter/warrior for their tribe, happily married to his beautiful wife who is expecting their second child, when their "Apocalypto" takes place, changing their lives forever. Just as an iceberg the size of London and Manhattan has broken off from the ice shelf to melt into water that will be the next "Great Flood" of our time, our heroic family fights to survive under the most vile, extreme circumstances humanity has to offer, finding each other before the next wave of corruption and death rolls in. After our hero finally escapes for good (surviving many life-or-death battles his young family does without him), they do what any sane, rational people facing the end of the world do: head for higher ground. 

My G-d Bless You And Keep You Safe, My Most Faithful Children Of The Word. Amen.

The Colony

Despite depictions to the contrary, the continents of the Americas were already settled and populated for millennium before the European invasion, though carefully cultivated propaganda often repeated has done its best to suggest otherwise. In fact, while doing a word search for links to this piece, words like "occupation" and "invasion" were nonexistent when grouped with "European" and "America", replaced by the far more benign and majestic-sounding "Age of Exploration" (rather one-sided), or "colonization", implying that plenty of space was "up for grabs" and available without years of murder, torture, and displacement, which is simply not true.

It is a concept that's also reinforced in Euro-centric schools here in the United States, shown to schoolchildren as the Pilgrims and Indians happily sharing a feast together in what colonists called "The New World". Fellowship and friendship among people isn't arguable, though the intentions of a bunch of rabid nut-jobs like the Puritans were definitely suspect, and therein lies the truth: that "colonists" like them were driven from their homelands for religious extremism and other acts of violence against men, much like the establishment of penal colonies in Australia.

Convicts were often given a choice between prison and expulsion, because a long sea voyage that may be your untimely death was preferable to rotting in jail. Given the feudal system of medieval Europe, it's no wonder their "undesirables" chose a boat instead. The lord/serf system of labor and land ownership was a direct precursor to the slave economy of the American South, and just as deranged. In Europe, serfs were considered property just like they were here, in colonies created for economic expansion and world domination.

Not that it stopped there. With the advent of the media age came new conduits for programming and/or re-programming, as the case may be. Movie after movie after movie showed the handsome white man "dressed to kill" in his ten-gallon hat, armed and dangerous to the savagely murderous Indians who pillaged their towns and raped their women, in an almost direct contrast to the actual battles waged on land already occupied by the First Nations. The hero wore white, the bad guy wore black, and the Indians bled red blood. Done! History for the Special Needs set: easily digestible and almost guilt-free.

Except that it wasn't. As indigenous people fought back harder than any "sophisticated" wealthy euro ever had the right to expect, those territories were left to the natives (now as disenfranchised and often poverty-stricken "reservations" free of U.S. interference), as other less contested lands were carved up by the governments of France, England, and Spain, until a new American identity was born to the children of proudly mixed parentage from "both sides of 'the pond'", which is where we stand today: a nation about to be led by yet another rich white man born to four European grandparents (with an Eastern Euro import wife), who won an election in the same "red" states fed by the southern slave economy that drives them back towards the same rich white man they remain indebted to. And you wondered why he isn't taking a salary for his presidency....<shakes head in disbelief>

Bathtub Gin

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Las_Vegas  

I never had great expectations about Las Vegas. So, when my father invited me and my Coloradan boyfriend to Vegas, Kent explained the trip to me like this: you won't like it because it's tacky and cheesy, but you should see it just once to understand what the hype is about. I loved his Anglo-Saxon bluntness about overblown tourist attractions that so matched my personality. We both hated unruly mobs of "Genericans" spending their money chasing a dream that would always be out of their reach, like his punk band playing at so many dive bars; there's only so many addicts you can put up with, before the bottles and the fists start flying.

The marketing campaign at the time advertised a more "family-friendly" experience, because Midwestern "family values" groups were targeting obvious hot spots like "Sin City", putting a huge dent in the notoriously crooked town that began with mob money way back when. From what we saw with my little brother during the daytime, their advertised clean-up was kind of true. We stayed at a rococo hotel decorated like a gay Roman bathhouse, with the added bonus of a small version of the Guggenheim Museum on the first floor. The exhibit featured American motorcycles, and my big lad couldn't have been happier about it.

We took my little bro to a hotel with an aquarium, and Kent rode the "New York, New York" roller coaster with him a few times, too. We strolled through each attraction in the air-conditioned underground via a series of inter-connected malls that blurred over time, with typical shit for sale. We went during August, the hottest month of the summer, in one of the hottest desert climates we have, thus ensuring the cheapest fares. The hotels had enormous water misters at every outdoor cafe and restaurant to spray the crowd down and keep them shopping; the same fake humidity that Denver used to "green" its lawns and parks artificially.

But at night, the town changed character completely. At one point, there were so many flyers for hookers strewn on the streets that we began shielding my little brother's eyes during every intersection we crossed, revealing the true character of the town that so many Disney-like structures sought to obscure with their phony cartoon cheeriness. It was fake, but so what? We felt worse for the retired seniors who were susceptible to gambling addictions, mindlessly pulling on the arms of so many slot machines that took their life savings. It was really fucking depressing.

After so much time underground, you begin to forget what time it is, whether it's day or night, and the day of the week. My dad won a few hundred bucks at a machine in a mall court, which found me and Kent escorting my brother 100 yards away from him because it's illegal to have children around gambling. We waited in front of some storefront while an employee gave him his winnings. And that was it; our Vegas vacation. Pleasant, but no big deal. When I saw on the news recently that workers were drilling a hole underneath Lake Mead (the only water source for all life in that area) so they could drain it like a bathtub, I knew it had gotten much worse since our visit in the late 90s.

With the sickness in Oklahoma, I'm not sure which crisis is worse. Chemical companies have been pouring waste water underground, destabilizing the entire region. There have been over 900 earthquakes already, and the situation worsens with each passing day. Unfortunately, we've seen what "the white man" can do to our Mother Earth here in the Americas, and it needs to stop. Today. I'm calling on my native people to pray like the faithful people I know you to be, to end this madness forever. You need to take back the land that is rightfully yours. You need to "go native". You need to "see red". 
I know I do.

Esprit de Corps

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tirant_lo_Blanch#

The literal translation for "esprit de corps"* is the spirit as it is expressed through the body, though its older usage described morale in the military. In truth, it was the best description I had for a Pinterest board I made about movement that covered art, dance, athleticism, martial arts, motion, movement, and the joy of being alive as it relates to the use of our bodies. Certainly, anyone who's ever been in mortal danger has their muscle memories to thank for the continued use of their body as it relates to other activities in a more peaceful future.

Sometimes, when I talk to my mom about my dreams or her MS, she tells me she has recurring dreams about running through a field of grass when, in truth, she was never athletic or even inclined to be active, preferring instead to sit and talk on the phone for hours, or dunk cookies in her tea (annoyingly, when also on the phone), or watch t.v. as she flips through magazines. She'll say it's because of her illness or her allergies (that she also sometimes forgets she has) but, really, it's because her personality prefers sedentary creature comforts. How odd, then, that her brain conjures up vigorous movement to express freedom and joy; feelings she was much more apt to attribute to cars rather than herself when she was younger and slightly more mobile, as part of her innate preferences for machines and artificial experiences over the real and the human.

When I studied ballet, I loved flying through the air the same way I liked swinging through the trees in our backyard, or spinning in a tire swing. Children excel at movement, in part because of their lower centers of gravity, something my less physically gifted parents would often quote at us, as further excuses for their inertia, cleverly designed to hide their laziness through pseudo-scientific phrasing. In contrast, we were made to work all the time, and when we did feel sick or take breaks, our parents hated that, too. "Get up! Do something!" It felt like they used us as charms to stave off their diseases, when they actually nursed our afflictions to budding stages.

There was a ferocity to our play-fighting as kids that transcended the typical city dwellers experience. My mom described us as "savages" or "wild monkeys hopped up on sugar" to her friends and family who are also round and cynical about it.  What were we?! She described the differences between us "soooo strange", like we were bound to be discovered as an ancient pygmy tribe from the bush any day. Me and my brother could fight for hours, scaling the narrow walls of our house's hallway like contestants on the game show "American Ninja Warrior", and it totally freaked her out. She'd never seen stuff like that before, especially among her squat hobbit clan.

I saw a native boy compete on the show last season, without any targeted training or benefit of a special obstacle course built just for appearing on the show, because he rightly assumed that his competitive sport of mountain climbing would do the trick for him, and it did. He grabbed a rope, released it in midair while spinning around to backwards-grab a moving obstacle that he then leapt from, landing perfectly on a mat with both feet. "Whoa! WHAT WAS THAT?!!", one of the announcers yelled out to the roaring crowd. That was an Indian, bro. His bright black eyes flashed with the same gleeful intensity as his big beautiful smile, pressing the red button that signalled his succesful finish. Welcome to the fight. We've missed you.


* https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/esprit%20de%20corps

Camp Out

The suggestion of any overnight venture with a bunch of insane (and gay) Girl Scouts was stomach-churning to me in the extreme, but me and my mom had already committed to being there, so we wanted to see it through. I was at the end of my rope with this clique, in the same way I practically decided overnight (to my rather detached and then suddenly overly-aggressive parents) that I would not pursue anorexia nervosa with a bitchy all-girl ballet troupe for a living, like, after the very first lesson, but they needed years to work out their overreaction to kids in tutus, which I understood, to a point. I'm really cute! This felt like that: I knew what was going on, but they needed "time to process it", which was our family's go-to phrase for mental disabilities and serious learning impairments.

Such is the way of life for the healthy children of sick parents, and, besides visits from my grandparents, I didn't know any other types of experiences at home, because all of my classmates and friends growing up had similar stories (or worse) to add as fuel to our group's fire. We hated our home lives, but children can only do so much, not that it stopped our parents from using us however they saw fit, which was poorly and often. My mom's neighbors in her current senior neighborhood are the exact same way: crazy angry city parents suffering from serious disorders who back up one another over, say, the health of any other type of human being on the planet, give or take a few acceptable life forms like their plants, because in "DivaLand", they must always come first, or abuse will surely follow.

"Yeah, Diane!" Ruth calls out to me working for my mother, like I always do. "That's what children are for!" And that's how they see it: they're sick (and now old, too) and we're not, so they will tap us until we crack, if we stick around, in between hours of free labor. Then, you co-dependently cycle through your circle to bleed other people dry, which doesn't work, because they're sick, too. So, it's back to me? NO! I'm so shocked! It's like a really bad play that's repeated over and over again, and any events or activities attached to them as a generation played out more or less the same, which made us tired of parenting them as children, which, as far as I can tell, is unique to Generation X. Nonetheless, they we were: at a horrible overnight with a fucked-up troop of gay Girl Scouts and their crazy butch "leader".

It was to be borne with as little drama as possible, but with manic depression flowing as freely as the soda that sustained these raging bitches, we were kinda doomed from the beginning. Not that I needed anymore confirmation about these types of things. Sigh...parenting is really hard in childhood, you know? I felt like I needed coffee with my mom and the other parents just to get through the night, and I don't need caffeine to remain aware mentally, which means I'm forced to undergo rigorous feats of endurance, yet again, that I did not need to repeat. My ethnic background and my home tribe of Acadian boys had pretty much set me up for country life, anyway. I didn't need these fucking chicks, and they hated that, too. Becoming overly attached is a sign of involvement in the "Mental Patient" world, and we knew how that play ended, too: badly. For you.

With this mindset of gritted teeth backed by true grit, it was simply a situation made to be borne out by me, however it happened, and I just hoped none of the country queers (and their pampered city parents) died or tried to kill each other throughout the madness that would surely ensue, because that's what madness does to people and their children, gay or not. The mothers were set up in a cabin, and my mom had already bitched about that to the Nth degree with her own act that spanned three curtain calls, because before she had MS as a convenient excuse to freak out, she used a hypothetical "bad back" and "pre-arthritic condition" that was possibly osteoarthritis (so interesting!) that she could deliver expertly when it was needed for her comfort, like sleeping on the wood floor of an old tent in a sleeping bag, like I did with the other children in the troop. But, not her. Oh, no.

She explained in great detail how she had several unique conditions that required special treatment, like a pad to sleep on and her own bed, which she got, while I wondered who would try to kill a girl first in the big tent at the camp. It wasn't long before I found out. There was movement along one side of the tent that sent the already-hysterical girls screaming like it was their big scene in a "Jason" movie, except it wasn't. It was probably a snake attracted to the lights they insisted in shining after "lights out", because of their night terrors, also a greatly understood part of the their tribal culture that was easily assimilated by their types of brains. Yes! Had to be it! I sighed, took a look, decided (what I already knew) that they weren't worth talking to, and then went to find my mom at her continued coffee klatch that was "hardship" in Diane-speak.

She decided that it was worth checking out, after she had abandoned me to sleep there on my own with those crazy bitches because the floor was "too hard", even though she had a stiff wood board installed beneath her mattress for firmness at home, with a gay little step-stool on her side of the bed, so she could get into her prized "antique" bed. I knew about it from every angle, because all of my young life I was forced to help her with everything, included flipping her orthopedic mattress, adjusting the wood slats under the bed, changing the sheets (of course), and adjusting the wood board. She had to have light-proof shades, the birds were also too noisy by her window, and she had a bevy of water-bottles, cold compresses, pills, special pillows, and other accoutrements attached to her bed-rest days that included hoarding piles of papers on my father's side of the bed that she would then dump onto the floor at night, until he finally forced her to go through it.

I didn't expect much courage from her, is what I mean to write to y'all. And she didn't disappoint me, as she played the "city mouse" frightened by the woods at night to a hilt. We talked it over as a group (sort of), and after my mom was also similarly reassured that they were bat-shit and overreacting to normal nighttime stimuli (like noises and movement) as a means of entertainment, she left after finally suggesting that maybe the boys from an overnighting Boy Scout troop were pranking them by pulling on the tent flaps, and that was it. Boys?! NOOO!!! "My mother specifically said I was not to interact with boys!" It sent a shiver of terror through the group that was way worse than a snake sighting, but I was psyched. I could use my flashlight to signal for help! Heck, it was better than having to go through the torture of picking an "outhouse buddy" with some chick in a full-on house bathrobe, metal mouth retainer, and bunny slippers. Fuck, man...where's my badge for that? None was forthcoming.

But, I'd made my point with Diane, and the next morning's pancake breakfast cinched the deal for me, forever. We were done, and my mom had a tale of torture and abuse that included severe back pain with lots of <insert her brand of medicine here>, and a total lack of sleep because the mattress was "lumpy". I got closure, and an end to enforced gay girl groups for me, for the rest of my childhood. It was quiet, I cried a lot in my room from the sheer loneliness and isolation of it, but at least I could read, and since that was considered an "educational pursuit" by my upwardly-mobile parents, they couldn't be seen as ripping that away from me, under my grandparents watch. All I had to do now was make it into college. And wait. There was always a lot of that to spare. Just hunker down, and wait it out.

Y2K

 

My Scottish/British-American boyfriend and I decided we'd spend the end of the world at one of the most beautiful spots in the Rocky Mountains; Glenwood Springs, Colorado. It has a huge outdoor swimming pool full of the sulphurous-smelling water, immediately verifying its lauded status as a natural source of mineral water that bubbles up naturally from the ground. There are also natural red rock caves catering to the modern "spa aficionado", with requisite red clay treatments and New Age "healing" massages. 

I'd finally convinced my old-fashioned father to get one on a previous trip there with my ex, and he and his second wife chose to get the "Couples Massage" together, which meant that the poor female masseuse working that day had to spread clay on them one at a time, in front of each other in the nude, and these were people who still thought sleeping together in the same bed was kind of risque. But, it established a pattern of deep tissue massage that my father would continue after that initial exposure to the traditional healing arts, and I'm glad. He's had bad back problems for most of his adult life.

The underground red rock caves dripped with the natural mineral water that'd been used since ancient times by the Ute Indians for healing, so we figured the place must be steeped in good "juju" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juju). What better way to go out than in the middle of a natural American wonder? It seemed apt to us that if the world ended, we'd be floating weightlessly in a huge body of mineral water that made you seem lighter, like floating in the Dead Sea, looking up at the great Milky Way stars burning brighter in the high dark skies of the rural west. 

Then, after we'd accepted our part in this "New World Order", we'd fight our way to my dad's ranch in West Texas, "Mad Max"-style (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Max). Kent and I figured on the drive there that natural gas for our vehicles would be the most precious resource during the upcoming "Apocalypse", so we'd probably have to fight off marauders from stealing our fuel for the ride through New Mexico to the panhandle. There, we'd steal onto my dad's ranch to await our fate(s). After all, Kent had installed a solar-powered unit for my dad's use at the small shack they had on the ranch that could run A/C and water. That, and the solar water pumps on the property combined with my dad's cattle could take us to the very end, if we played it right. My pops also had land that'd been used by the ancients for long-term living. 

There were dripping overhangs and small streams that had huge rocks with the circular indentations from the pounding of wheat over millennia. If they could do it back then, so could we. We came from them, too. We'd feel it stirring in our blood, the will to survive off the land: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Texas#/media/File:Palo_Duro_Canyon_State_Park_2002.jpg. We'd be completely off the maps of the known western world. Let 'em find us buried deep in the canyons somewhere, safe in our ranch land stronghold.

In preparation for our requisite battle(s) on our route to "nowhere", we'd obviously have to have weapons, so Kent put his big elk-hunting guns in the back of his big red truck, with a couple of red containers full of gasoline, in the event of a total annihilation that knocked out all of the power sources on the planet. Of course, we're working class people, so the night before "the big event", we were asleep before 10:30 pm. Oh, well. I'd never really had it in me to stay up past midnight just to drink a beer or a glass of champagne at midnight. Who cares? We could that whatever we wanted to, not just New Year's Eve. So, we said our "good nights" to each other, and we were fast asleep soon; such is the effect of swimming in a natural hot spring all day long. 

Since it was wintertime, you'd have to do a quick hop from the big hot pool to the smaller really hot tub while sporting a knit cap, but that was about it. Above a mile high, the sun is still very warm, even in the middle of a Coloradan winter. We had fun looking at this one cute lil baby floating in a little plastic inner tube for adorable baby girls wearing striped knit caps on their "widdle" baby heads, laughing and splashing with her mama as she floated around the big pool like we did. We smiled, and rested at the edge of the pool. Not a bad way to go. We'd done it! We'd made the end of the world "cool" without even really trying to, just like every other thing my generation has had to survive and endure at the hands of others who should have known better. But, that's the way it was. We had to survive, so we did.

As we woke up the next day to a bright sunny day, Kent immediately checked the digital alarm clock as I turned on the t.v. in the motel room for the news. Nope! No apocalypse. Oh. We'd figured that it wouldn't happen, what with our computer skills for reference and the amount of time to prep for the changing of so many digital clocks that folks had to get right, but, you never know! Best to be prepared. We turned to each not speaking. "I'm a little disappointed..." I began tentatively. Kent immediately brightened up. "Me, too!" and he went on to say, "I was kinda looking forward to fighting my way out of it. I mean, I know we'd win." Yeah, you're right. We would have. Sigh...

We got dressed, had a big pancake breakfast dinner at Denny's, then rolled out of town for the drive back to Denver to pick up Teddy from the kennel. And just like that, we'd begun planning the rest of our work week. After all, the newspaper didn't wait for me, and neither did the power supply that was still working off a functioning grid for his electrical work. "No rest for the weary" they say, but the thing of it was this: we'd never felt more well-rested in all of our lives. We had a great plan, and we'd been kinda looking forward to executing it with excellence, just like every other thing that demanded our attention and skills. That's the job. That's what we did then, and that's what we do now. We work our way out of it, because we can. For you. All of you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenwood_Springs,_Colorado

for Kent

I ` M Gonna Be

The Proclaimers

When I wake up, well, I know I'm gonna be
I'm gonna be the man who wakes up next to you
When I go out, yeah, I know I'm gonna be
I'm gonna be the man who goes along with you
If I get drunk, well, I know I'm gonna be
I'm gonna be the man who gets drunk next to you
And if I haver, hey, I know I'm gonna be
I'm gonna be the man who's havering to you
But I would walk five hundred miles
And I would walk five hundred more
Just to be the man who walked a thousand miles
To fall down at your door
When I'm working, yes, I know I'm gonna be
I'm gonna be the man who's working hard for you
And when the money comes in for the work I do
I'll pass almost every penny on to you
When I come home (When I come home), oh, I know I'm gonna be
I'm gonna be the man who comes back home to you
And if I grow old, well, I know I'm gonna be
I'm gonna be the man who's growing old with you
But I would walk five hundred miles
And I would walk five hundred more
Just to be the man who walked a thousand miles
To fall down at your door
Da lat da (Da lat da), da lat da (Da lat da)
Da-da-da dun-diddle un-diddle un-diddle uh da-da
Da lat da (Da lat da), da lat da (Da lat da)
Da-da-da dun-diddle un-diddle un-diddle uh da-da
When I'm lonely, well, I know I'm gonna be
I'm gonna be the man who's lonely without you
And when I'm dreaming, well, I know I'm gonna dream
I'm gonna dream about the time when I'm with you
When I go out (When I go out), well, I know I'm gonna be
I'm gonna be the man who goes along with you
And when I come home (When I come home), yes, I know I'm gonna be
I'm gonna be the man who comes back home with you
I'm gonna be the man who's coming home with you
But I would walk five hundred miles
And I would walk five hundred more
Just to be the man who walked a thousand miles
To fall down at your door
Da lat da (Da lat da), da lat da (Da lat da)
Da-da-da dun-diddle un-diddle un-diddle uh da-da
Da lat da (Da lat da), da lat da (Da lat da)
Da-da-da dun-diddle un-diddle un-diddle uh da-da
Da lat da (Da lat da), da lat da (Da lat da)
Da-da-da dun-diddle un-diddle un-diddle uh da-da
Da lat da (Da lat da), da lat da (Da lat da)
Da-da-da dun-diddle un-diddle un-diddle uh da-da
And I would walk five hundred miles
And I would walk five hundred more
Just to be the man who walked a thousand miles
To fall down at your door

The Last Days of Shishmaref

Like so many people this time of year, I've been dragging around town half-heartedly doing errands, in an effort to get my chores done before a full-blown cold settles in. I'm really tired, necessitating lots of tea, napping, and the elimination of dairy products from my diet, at the suggestion of a local barista and my doctor alike. While I rest up with that run-down feeling, I've been catching up on t.v. with a few DVDs from the library.

"The Last Days of Shishmaref", a documentary about a region of Alaska and the native Eskimo people who live a traditional lifestyle there, is a visually arresting movie. It's wild America at its most beautiful.

The climate is quickly changing in a warming trend that's been dramatically effecting the seasons for a long time now, with the polar ice caps melting to catastrophic effect. Bearing the brunt of this global impact are the Inupiaq people, who have relied upon seasonality to provide for their families for over 4,000 years.

Worsening storms from enormous ice melts and longer warm seasons have caused so much damage to their small island, that the tribe has already moved their homes back from the shoreline once. Sadly, that's not enough to save it. Shishmaref will soon be totally under water. 

The good news is that part of the mainland has been reclaimed for their tribe. They will still have their ancestral hunting grounds and fishing territories, though serious adjustments will be made by their moving. They have been an island people for a very long time.

While the wheels of government adjust slowly to our everday realities, the fact is this: relocation is extremely costly to people and the environment. The move for Shishmaref costs about $186 million, money that could have been spent on sustainable, eco-friendly tenchonlogies a long time ago. What say we make the wheels of change move a little quicker? The indigenous people of the Americas were here first. It's only fair: http://www.thelastdaysofshishmaref.com/shishmaref3/cms/cms_module/index.php

In this global world we live in, we are all neighbors.