Hey Suzy Q

Like you, your timing is a thing of wonderment and beauty. 😊  Tell me what’s going on in your life! Start with what you do for a living. I’m currently between gigs.  

You find me in a state of existential peril. My daily life feels like an out-of-body experience. I don’t know if I should start at the beginning or ‘frame’ it for clarity’s sake. … okay, I’ll frame it.

 

Strap yourself in, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

 

First, the good news. I have a dog I’m crazy about named Parkhour. I’ll try to remember to attach a pic. Onto the fun stuff.

 

I’m going in for hernia surgery tomorrow. Medicaid is covering it, or most of it. But I don’t have a job. I’ve also been served with papers for eviction court. Court date is set for the day after my surgery. Filing for a postponement costs $135 I’d much rather put toward paying rent.

 

I have a customer service gig job interview at 3 today. My head is completely not in the game and my heart is beating like a jackhammer.

 

Worst of everything, my son wants nothing to do with me. His mother took it in her cabeza last year to take him away from me, because circumstances made it convenient for her. I had forbade her from taking Luke out of town anymore after she took him to Yosemite in high fire season and had to actively flee the Park last summer with fire beating down behind them. She thought it was funny. I had of course begged her not to do what she went on to do, so she sent me photos out the back window of the car, showing all fire and smoke. So I said, “No more!”

 

That’s when she reminded me that in Idaho, at 16 Luke gained a degree of agency over which parent he chose to live with. Then between the end of summer and the start of Christmas vacation—the next time she ‘needed’ to take him out of state—she bought him a new computer and they agreed not to tell me about it. She put him on a spendy allowance—and they agreed not to tell me about it.

 

And everything they did together—all of it instituted and directed by the adult in the relationship—that improved his circumstances there that was kept a secret between the two of them, had the calculated effect of alienating me, and inculcating the two of them in Conspiracy.

 

They have a word for it now: Grooming. His fucking mother groomed him away from me with conspiracy-building and financial enticements. Despicable. So unbelievably despicable nobody believes it.

 

It’s empirically provable. A subpoena of their texts would reveal all. But no one believes me because she’s the college academic and I’m the Pete Brooks. Now fallen on truly Hard Times. Like, end-of-run hard times. I do not have a single card left to play, Suzy Q.

 

My newspaper gigs finally dried all up in 2022. I went for an aspirational career change and got a job in child care at the start of this year. It was magic! All these little pre-K kids running around, and napping and playing and eating and OMG SuzyQ I was in heaven. I saw Luke in all of them and that filled me with… hope, I guess. Kids represent that, don’t they? The possibility for change, for something better.

 

But then I got laid low by a mystery weakness in my gut and found that I was physically incapable of doing the gig. A long time later now I’ve finally been diagnosed, authorized for treatment, scheduled for surgery… but now I’ve been out of work so long I’m badly delinquent on my rent and currently still scheduled for eviction Court on Thursday, and surgery tomorrow, Wednesday.

 

I gotta cut it short now—thankfully—because of all the shit that needs handling today. After surgery tomorrow I’m gonna be weak as a kitten. Luke is scheduled to come over and babysit me for the first few days after surgery but he’s really pissy about it. Experience suggests he’s getting lots of feedback at his Mom’s house about me and my situation. He’s not even the same kid anymore.

 

It's so despicable as to beggar description, so despicable no one believes that’s what happened and is continuing to happen. Dammit, when he grows up he’s gonna have issues with how he treated/is treating me. I know that sure as God made little green apples, I even tried to communicate it to his mother but she’s gone, man. She doesn’t give Shit One about the long-term damage she’s doing as long as she feels like she’s winning.

 

Ha! I wouldn’t vote for Trump, but I ended up marrying her.

 

I gotta go. Have to mail some comics to somebody who apparently bought them on ebay. But it’s my first sale so I don’t know what the fuck is going on. Only that I have an interview at 3 for a job I don’t really want and am unsure I’ll be able to do and have to start half-way through my surgery recovery schedule and that’s if I even get it.

 

I don’t like my odds. If I end up on the street, pneumonia will take me this winter.

 

So tell me your story and make it a happy one!

For the children, the environment and Wink Musselman

Clickpic to play moviefilm.

Small-town America’s dirty little ‘Peculiar Institution’

DATELINE: ANYTOWN, RR4, box 32—I wrote probably my least-favorite column ever last week, exposing the endemic culture of childhood sexual abuse in my typical Red rural state. It was only meant to be a preamble to this piece, but I preambled all the way off the reservation. The whole subject really sticks in my craw. If I never talk about it again after this I’ll be a happier man for it.

“What does this have to do with my life in BigCity, California?” you ask, reasonably. 

I write because I care.

I write because it’s the only tool I have at my disposal.

I write because sometimes my thought process makes connections ahead of popular culture’s notice and when it’s a bad one, I turn to my toolkit and try to help by being the town crier. If I can’t solve said bad thing, and I almost never can, I can at least shine a spotlight on it and hope like hell that more powerful media entities pick it up from the Zeitgiest.

And if I can change one reader’s mind, un-harden one heart, compel even one person to take a more honest look at their own behavior and course-correct, I win at life that day.

This is the second half of last week’s minor epistle. But it won’t sound like it at first. Please bear with me as I try to hammer out my narrative without having to Google names and dates. Just hate Googling names and dates.

This column is mostly set in the world of national politics, but in the end it comes down to a growing threat to every community in America—ours included. 

First, briefly about my own prejudices and inclinations, necessary context to have if you choose to consider my prognostication. 

I am so not here to have a fight. It’s my opinion that The Fight is also The Problem. Not either side of the fight, the fight itself. So I took myself out of the ring. Off social media to the extent that I have a FB account, but it’s dormant and I keep it around only to be able to log into other, less evil sites. Also I’ve learned that in 2022, it’s suspect if one doesn’t have any social media presence.

Beyond that key byte of biographical data, I’m a disaffected former left-winger. I’ve always tilted towards helping out the underdog, even when it was inconvenient. That grew to mean I supported giving government money to people who had had the temerity to be born into the wrong family. Think about it. That’s the only moral failing most poor people are guilty of. “Whoops! Picked the wrong uteris, your life will inevitably suck. Tough break, kid. Next…!”

Anyways, when I got around to thinking about voting things, it became clear to me right away, even back then, that the Republicans were all about money. Specifically, their own money.

And the other guys were trying to pass bills to feed the hungry, house the homeless, etc. The Democrats were reckless with money in pursuit of social equity and that suited me just fine.

Time passed and politics changed from something only wonks and policy geeks paid any attention to, to big, big business.

I dropped out during the run-up to the 2016 election. I looked at both Presidential candidates and all I saw were variations on the same theme. Forget the fact that they’re both white and Hillary is a woman; this column doesn’t traffic in talking-points. What I saw that scared me were two wealthy, insulated, megalomanic narcissists battling it out for the same shiny object. Clearly they both felt like the job was owed to them; that it was theirs by predestined fiat. 

That shoulda disqualified both of them right there. It did for me. Couldn’t toss my hat in either ring anymore. I just had a crazy hunch that either one of them would be equally likely to throw the country under the bus if their egos required it.

Now we’re at what I want to talk about.

The GOP candidate (henceforth The Candidate) had lost me way back at ‘rapists crossing the border.’ Like a lot of people, I found almost everything about him dishonorable; I’m not gonna litigate that here or anywhere. I’m just saying I recognized him for the man he was and it wasn’t anything I was attracted to, nor wanted anywhere near the Oval Office.

Then there was Hillary and her inexhaustible, insufferable hubris. ‘nuff said.

But when The Candidate was elected, after a while the media and I both (me just a little first) noticed that whatever wickedness The Candidate accused anyone else of always turned out to be the same awful thing that he himself was accused of in a couple weeks and later found/will be found guilty of. 

Every time the former candidate popped off about something seemingly random and accused his enemies of doing it—just out of the blue—“Russia if you’re listening…”—was a ‘tell’ that he was talking about something that was gonna come out in about a week or two about him. Over and over and over again. For instance:

He cozied up to and shared private time with top Russian officials in the oval Office on Inauguration Day. HIS CAMPAIGN PROJECTION: Hillary is in bed with the Russians and Obama is a “traitor.”

The Candidate—once elected—flagrantly, wantonly, publicly flouted his administration’s bacchanalia of abuse of power. He openly reveled in it. “I could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue…” he once gushed; you know the rest of it. HIS CAMPAIGN PROJECTION: Hillary killed Vince Foster along with various other people, entities and newborns. Why, she’s still off a-murderin’ folks, btw.

Remember “Crooked Hillary”? How about “Lying Ted”? The Candidate had his rally attendees chanting that stuff back at him on the campaign trail, all while he has already been found guilty of criming and lying his way across America on the public dime, no less. HIS CAMPAIGN PROJECTION: Textbook narcissist behavior. Accuse the other guy—first—of what you’re guilty of. Then when Bombshell X hits the tabs, you’ve muddied the waters hopefully enough that you’re just another high-profile guy being accused of whatever the last guy (that he accused) was accused of. If it doesn’t blow over, do something even crazier. The new toy usually gets the most attention.

Google ‘narcissism’ and it reads like the prologue to an honest biography of the former candidate.

And here’s the thing; about a third of the country went along with him for this ride. And have since successfully adapted his methods, tactics and lack of constructive goals for America to their local political cesspool. Including one of his most pernicious traits, the projection thing. Accusing other people of what you yourself are guilty of. In the short run you muddy the waters of your own indiscretions and in the long run… in the long run, you normalize the aberrant behavior in question until it becomes part of the new normal. We’ve all watched as the formerly unthinkable metastasized into bitter but resigned new normals over the last decade. We swore at the time it wouldn’t happen, but it has.

And here’s my thought. What broad theme is the former candidate’s base—both on social and ‘professional’ media—currently going on about that sounds so evil as to appear ridiculous on its face? An obsession with pedophilia. A really lewd, detailed, overly-specific gusher of outrage about all things child sexual abuse. 

Do I even need to say it? I smell a projection. The kind of sexual predation hell that exists in my state must exist elsewhere too, and bringing it up out of the blue then accusing your political enemies of it? The way the national GOP is doing en masse right now? Emulating their leader?

In poker they call it a ‘tell.’ In this case it’s revealing a brazen attempt to normalize the cherished small-town ‘tradition’ of inevitable childhood sexual abuse.

The GOP has somehow not yet sunk to its lowest moral depth, nor scaled its highest height of infamy. 

God help the kids.

Where have all the fast-food workers gone?

WARNING: This column discusses the horror of child sexual abuse. If you don’t want to read about any of that, I don’t blame you and please don’t! With my blessing, as well as my best wishes personally.

DATELINE: ANYTOWN, RR4, box 32—There are some abysses even I’m afraid to stare-down. Stuff I absolutely don’t want to be writing about. I’ve waited and waited for some major media entity to put together what seems obvious to me and make clickbait out of it. And this is national-level stuff I’m about to plow into, thus the whisper of patriotism in my conscience, urging me over another cliff.

I’ve gone out of my way to not reveal which rural Red state I live in. That’s because I assume that, for the stuff I’m writing about, my state is representative of ‘the rural red state culture’ and to cite it by name would be to unfairly single it out among its equally ghastly brethren.

The town I live in is hundreds of miles away from any city of commensurate size or population. Before the internet, in most of our lifetimes and dating back to literally forever, living hundreds of miles out in the Boonies meant you were a cut-off, cloistered community. The invention of the telephone lessened some of that social isolation, but the geographical distance remained daunting. Over the decades and generations, this isolation created a climate locally of, “What happens in Anytown, stays in Anytown.” And it implies exactly what the Las Vegas Tourist Council ad did in its day.

Due to the factors contributing to the Petri dish in which this particular depravity thrives, it’s impossible and foolish not to extrapolate this paradigm to other isolated communities. In America. In the world. Throughout history. 

I’ve lived in many cities, towns and states of various configurations, and this rural backwater is the first place I’ve ever been where I’ve experienced this phenomenon on such a massive, socially-accepted scale. It’s everybody’s little open secret.

I was on a gig the other day, talking to a born-and-bred Anytownian Grandma who was in the park with her three granddaughters, aged 7 and under. Five minutes hadn’t passed before she was spilling her guts to me about one of the girls’ dads, and what happened to all 3 girls when they were left in his care recently. I felt dizzy and sick, even though I’d been queasy ever since Grandma mentioned ahead of time that she had 3 grandkids under 10, all girls. I knew the odds were stacked against them, living in this state, but oh Lord my God.

As the Grandma sought to comfort me [oh brother, I know] she mentioned as if to soften the blow somehow that the same thing had happened to her, and when she spoke about her own childhood abuse, she shrugged. She glanced at me briefly, sadly, then went on talking about the weather or something. But the guy who hurt her grandkids? She wants that SOB DOA. 

The phrase I’ve been dancing around, trying to avoid, is rape culture. And Anytown is neck-deep in it. None of the adult locals, my peer group, want to have anything to do with talking about it. The men get defensive and play dumb and the women get worried and suddenly look older. But my gig brings me into contact with college-aged locals, townies, and they’re willing to talk about, what to them, are still relatively recent events. The wounds haven’t calloused-up yet.

I had one young woman tell me, “I think I was raped yesterday” in a small voice, mid-conversation. She thinks? Another mentioned, in the course of telling a longer story, “…and I got raped by my [dealer] a couple days ago…” and blew right past it in her narrative. I have scads of such stories.

And it’s never just them, it’s always their sisters, too. Somebody in the family is always at the age mommy’s boyfriend is looking at. And Mommy? Also a childhood abuse victim. She should know better, but Mommy is broken. What she knows better than to do is go the police, the good ole boys in blue. Daddy will be very angry when the police drive them all back home.

Because the police, the born-and-bred ones? Most of them have been there themselves, doing the abusing, and didn’t suffer any consequence at all. Hell, they’re policemen now lol

It would be dirty pool to wreck this poor fella’s life for the same thing. This is part of what “holding onto traditional values” looks like out here. Systemic childhood sexual abuse is one of the traditions they simply don’t want to let go of. 

I’m gonna go take a shower with pumice soap and lye, then come back and unleash my couldn’t-be-more-obvious revelation.

The big reveal, Part One: The reason why minimum wage employers can’t find teens and 20-somethings to fill their open positions? Friends, this generation of Anytown townies (at least) is graduating from high school and going straight into DIY, from-home online porn production. A McDonalds paycheck just can’t compete, even at $15/hour. And the boys? They act and treat their girlfriends like they’re pimps. They don’t need to work either, just hang around with and commoditize and mooch off their girlfriends. A more despicable bunch of young men I’ve never met, the townie boyfriend class.

Why hasn’t anyone with a higher-profile and higher IQ than I puzzled this out yet? All kinds of well-coifed media dolts everywhere are bleating in confusion and wonder about all the mysterious trouble that minimum wage-payers are having with hiring, but no one is asking, “Well, then what are this generation of kids doing for money instead?” Kids still want and/or need money, these days more than ever. How can they afford not to jump at big-city minimum wages for what’s always been reliable, steady fast-food work?

Yup.

And it’s not just the ‘bad’ girls either; the ones with the lurid reputations in high school. The lure of ‘easy’ money plus internet adulation cuts across all class lines. I guarantee, if you’re reading this, you know someone—or more likely, their kid—you’d never suspect in a million years is making big bank selling fantasies online. 

Dang it, this is gonna have to be two columns.

The thing happening culturally, nationally, that (apparently) it falls to me to point out connects directly to this, but it requires more column inches than I have left this week.

I usually try to end on a positive note, or even a suggestion to fix the problem, but all I got right now is two different crises that are feeding off and amplifying each other and nobody else has picked up on it yet.

Putting off finishing this for a week won’t make a damn bit of difference. Hopefully CNN will beat me to the scoop. 

Nothing would make me happier.

HELP WANTED: Country (some assembly required), seeks meteor expert

It’s getting tough to avoid the conclusion that America is teetering on the End Times of one thing and tipping over into the Beginning of something else. We’re in a new age of dinosaurs and our meteor has already entered the upper atmosphere.

But don’t be alarmed; we’ve been in close scrapes like this before and we’re still here. When America has had to adapt or die in the past, we’ve always chosen to adapt. (Maybe next week I’ll write a column on seat belts.)

When I was a kid, for example, everybody smoked cigarettes. Everybody. My Mom smoked lady-marketed cigarettes (Winston) and my Dad smoked Tareyton—a man’s cigarette! You knew it was a man’s cigarette because every ad featured a smiling model, male or female, with black-eye make-up, and the proud slogan “I’d rather fight than switch!”

Wherever I went when I was a kid, everybody smoked and smoked and smoked. In airplanes, public buses, restaurant kitchens, doctors’ offices… in period movies now it’s played for laughs because of the absurdity of some of the images. Like the overweight, slouching doctor taking a long drag off his cigarette, exhaling thoughtfully, then turning to face his patient and tell him, “I’m sorry, Mr. Caruthers, it’s cancer.”

Funny thing about smokers in real life though, they were dying off. In droves; in exponentially higher numbers than non-smokers, especially non-smokers who didn’t live in a household with a smoker. These numbers got out to the public and became impossible for any reasonable person to ignore. Society took steps.

Enabled by a supportive public, Big Government stepped in and erected such stiff tariffs and impediments to the marketing of cigarettes that over the course of my lifetime, cigarette smoking has gone from being as common as people updating their social media status, to a lifestyle choice made by die-hard enthusiasts and a few hopelessly-addicted fiends who’ve been trying to quit at least once a year since they were teenagers and Joe Kool was a cartoon camel.

And why not? Smoking is still their right. It always has been.

But it’s also everybody else’s right to not be exposed to the harmful byproduct of their lifestyle, second-hand smoke. Society agreed on that, too, and Things Changed. Smoking-related deaths now compared to when I was a kid? Almost negligible. Nobody I know thinks fewer preventable deaths is a bad thing. Cigarettes are still legal, but the number of cigarette-related deaths per year has plummeted as cigarettes have become more of a niche industry.

In 50 years. Starting with incremental government regulation.

Oh, you see through me! This isn’t about smoking at all, is it?

I sent my kid off to school last Thursday with an uncomfortably long hug. I’ll bet I’m not the only one, either.

Every time one of these mass shootings is perpetrated (don’t tell me they ‘occur’), the official response from the Right-Wing is trotted out: Thoughts and prayers & This isn’t the time for politics, people are grieving. It’s as predictable as the fact that there will be a next mass shooting.

I live in Conservative Country. The folks out here love their kids, throw charity auctions, they’ll give you the shirt off their back. But they’ve been raised on a diet of Fox News, the Christian Broadcasting Network and talk radio punditry their whole lives. Their whole lives they’ve had one specific, market-driven, deliberate falsehood drilled into their heads: The Liberals are coming to take your guns. All their friends were raised exposed to the same influences, so they mostly agree on politics, or at least gun politics. And this is still the Wild West, it’s literally always been gun country.

The point is, the subject isn’t up for civil conversation out here. Most non-gun owners I know are ‘in the closet.’ And our state is representative of wide swaths of the country. Gun-enthusiasm today has become as workaday as the pall of cigarette exhaust was 50 years ago. It’s a lifestyle choice, enshrined by the Constitution, a document otherwise filled with more-precisely worded propositions.

So we are left with ‘thoughts and prayers’ and ‘this isn’t the time’ as the number of mass shootings skyrockets. Every other piece you read on the subject will provide you with the appalling numbers with which you are probably already familiar.

So I come to you today with a proposal.

“Thoughts and prayers?” By all means, keep them coming. I believe The Force responds accordingly to outpourings of good or evil intent.

“This isn’t the time?” Let’s say ‘okay.’ It probably isn’t, just out of respect for the families grieving. For goodness’ sake, we can wait for them to bury their dead before we turn the tragedy into the political donneybrook everyone knows it will be.

So since we all agree this isn’t the time for a ‘conversation,’ legislatively, about guns in America, how about here in the immediate aftermath, we set a time- and date-certain for that conversation instead?

Get it on the legislative calendar with a bullet, if you’ll pardon the expression. Make the legislative date escape-proof. That way, the political brawl necessary to follow will finally be able to begin. And by then, the families of the victims will be trying, somehow, to rebuild shattered lives, presumably not tuning in to Rachel Maddow or Sean Hannity.

An excellent time for a ‘conversation,’ long-overdue, about some incremental legislation on guns. Prompted by the latest American tragedy, but examined in the aftermath of the aftermath, when—in theory—cooler heads may prevail.

Only 100 years ago, women did not have the right to vote. That sounds crazy to us today. They sound like dinosaurs to us, and only 100 years ago.

I want my grandkids to look back in a century and say, “…and oh my God, everybody owned guns!” No way, will say another, incredulous. “It’s true!” the first will assert, eyes wide. “And it was totally legal! I’ll show you a holo-projection!

And they’ll laugh at our generation and call us dinosaurs. And hopefully, they will be correct.

And God said, “Whatever you say, dear”

My Mom, Joan Marie Brooks, was born in the Midwest in 1926.

Google reports: In September of that year—on the 11th as it happens—a hurricane formed outside Miami which hit land one week later, eventually killing 372 people, injuring more than 5,000 and leaving some 43,000 Floridians homeless. In Japan, a promising young first-born son named Hirohito was crowned Emperor. Back stateside, Miles Davis was busy being born and the Hula Hoop was still some 25 years away from sweeping the nation. Mom would have been 3 years old on ‘Black Thursday,’ when the world financial markets crashed in 1929, ushering in the Great Depression—and her childhood.

Later, in the 1940s, she and my Dad (and occasionally other boys, from what she tells me) necked in the rumble seats of touring sedans under the streetlights of a sepia-tinted Chicago, back when everything was in Mono and black & white.

Music. Politics. Race… [pause for awkward silence—cough]

But Mom survived the Great Depression. And WWII, and polio, Elvis on Ed Sullivan (so many times, too!), the Cold War—even Pat Robertson’s wicked mendacity. Until the last year or so, she lived independently, proudly, on her own; grateful for the daily love, assistance and drama her daughter Peggy and granddaughter Janice and their families brought into her life.

As a kid, I asked her once why she and my Dad adopted kids instead of having some of their own. Mr. Sensitive, right? And she told me that although Daddy and her had prayed really, really hard for a long time, in the end, God had said ‘no.’ Which led to the tale of the Chosen Child, which was beautiful. “Your aunts and uncles had to take the babies they were given—we chose you.” Bam, case closed, we win! My whole childhood, I had this mental image of my aunts being wheeled into maternity wards and having random newborns thrust into their arms then wheeled out.

The years passed like a metaphor. Or perhaps they were a simile; I never could tell them apart.

While chatting with Mom shortly after she first fell seriously ill, I mentioned my recent 15th anniversary. She goes, “How long have you been married?” in a skeptical voice, dragging out the ‘how long’. 15 years, I repeat. “Wow,” she says. I go, what do you mean, ‘wow’? Her tone oozing sympathy for Leslie, she lamented, “Oh honey, you’re impossible to live with.”

Never even grasped the concept of ‘filter.’

Mom remained interested in life and held onto her deeply-unyielding opinions, and personal dignity, to the end. Well, almost right up to the end. Thanks to the miracle of modern medicine, Mom suffered way longer than any of us would have wished. And the absolute last thing to go was her noodle. After that, the end came quickly.

Over the course of a lifetime, if my Mom and I had had a Facebook status, it would definitely have been “Complicated.”

Like all of our generation of Brookses, my siblings [note to self: add names here if time permits] were adoptees too. At different times from different families. The last one, Peggy, after my Dad was about my age. How bonkers is that?! They kept on going even after my older brother Terry [is alleged to have] brought polio home from the orphanage, and then I’m told I brought something pernicious and infectious too. If I adopted a kid and they accidentally brought the plague into my house, I would still love and raise that kid as my own (should I survive)… but I would definitely not be rolling the dice a second time! Certainly not three or four more times.

Connie didn't bring anything home with her but sass and class.

Out of their need for family, our parents gave my brothers and sisters and me everything. A last name. Family; siblings, relatives. Social integration. A loving home, a softer place to land. And in some cases, a more interesting backstory than others.

The thing growing up was, my Mom was the proverbial immovable object, and so was I. We went at it hammer and tong, without relent. She had me on size and rank, but I had her on tactics and guile. We were too evenly matched, and we both reacted to each other’s violent provocations in kind. I regret now that I used my sister Peggy as a proxy for my Mom, but as she was usually allowed to watch the punishment that followed be meted out, it became what Lucas would call an ‘infinity loop’ of cross-generational domestic drama that only began to improve after I bought my first car for $350 and had a viable exfil strategy from heavy situations.

The second I moved out—two weeks after my 18th birthday so as not to insult my folks by leaving home before the age of majority—things immediately started getting better. I went to work with and for my Dad in the local lifting and toting racket, and Mom would come by my studio shotgun-shack and take me out grocery shopping, apparently determined to stuff my tiny, ancient fridge as full as her more capacious unit at home. I’d drop by the house, they’d be happy to see me instead of laying in wait; when things started to get tense, I had somewhere else I could be! Really took the stress off of all three of us.

Anyhow, Dad got old before Mom did. Dad was born in 1913, which is not a typo. And he got all kinds of sick eventually, like Olde Folks do. And Mom transitioned into Caretaker mode. It was somewhere around then that Mom and I made peace with my childhood. We talked it all out, we each mea-ed our culpas and we both begged the others’ forgiveness. It took years to convince her I was sincere and that I had really truly written the whole childhood thing off to ‘youthful indiscretions.’ (Lord, how she loved her George W Bush.)

Since then, we’ve become great friends. For the next 20-some years, one day a week was faithfully set aside to call Mom and catch each other up on what was going on in our lives. How was work at Skaggs-then-Osco? What was new with Peg and the kids? (It was always something!) How do you like the job W is doing now—really? Still??! and: How do I tweak the actual events of my life to make them Mom-friendly enough to discuss at least somewhat candidly?

It was mostly on Mondays we talked. Just last week—and I’m sure this was because my Mom was on my mind—I was bouncing down the stairs and asked myself, “Hey man, what day of the week is it again?” Monday. —Oh, Monday,  gotta call M** screech

Old habits die almost as hard as Mom did.

So there you have it: a thumbnail sketch of a complicated life from a son’s perspective. A life whose final act included legitimate spiritual redemption as well as increasingly impressive examples of putting her born-again Christian values to work. She would concede she was not the best Christian in the world when she was a Catholic, but when she let Jesus march into her heart, she walked the walk right alongside Him.

Which brings me to my little brother, Shane. He was a late-in-life addition to the family.

Picture this. I’m living in California in my late 20s, maybe early 30s, and Mom calls up. She’s taking in a roomer, she tells me. Some teenage boy who cuts her grass on weekends. Who had just been brought to her door by the police. “DO go on,” I say, trying to stifle the rising terror in my voice. I’m thinking: She fell for Pat Robertson’s line of bunk for decades, got sucked into all kinds of secular pyramid schemes along the way, trusted the wrong people with the family’s fortunes—if past was prologue, this kid would only be more of the same. “Candy on a stick,” my Dad used to call people like us. Still, Mom had already moved the young man in before she called me; Clara Barker didn’t raise any dummies. Mom had made two conditions with the cop and the kid. I forget the first one (Keep a clean house? Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain? Something like that.), but number two was she extracted a promise from the boy to go to church with her every week.

God had dropped this prime evangelical opportunity in her lap in her golden years and she was not about to waste it! And wouldn’t you know, with this son she finally succeeded. Shane grew up to be an upstanding, church-going man with a lovely family, all of whom consider Mom Grandma and Jesus Lord. A few weeks ago, Shane and his daughter Lainey made it to Tucson in time to meet Mom on a good [lucid] day. I understand it was a great day.

Sometimes, it turns out, God says “yes,” too.

My Mom was truly the strongest woman I’ve ever met, and she set the template for all the strong women I would admire (and eventually marry one of) the rest of my life.

And now she’s gone, and it’s like that taut ropeline that’s always—even from afar—tethered my life has been snipped and centrifugal force has sent me cartwheeling out of orbit, fidget-spinning my way into the unknown.

I feel adrift; an orphan again, among a family of orphans.

But we’re not orphans anymore, of course, which is the whole point. We’re a family. A family of Brookses, and Madsen-Brookses and Slenzaks and Tomalkas and Littlefields and Smiths and sisters and brothers and cousins and grandkids, aunts and uncles…

All because God said no, and my Mom replied, “We’ll see about that.”

Fast-forwarding through the Golden Globes, 2017 edition

Little Jimmy O’Fallon hits the stage, his teleprompter isn’t loaded and he begins to panic. The actual comics in the room try to avoid eye contact with the roving cameras as O’Fallon drowns in flop sweat onstage; he hasn’t been this embarrassing on TV since he was tousling Donald Trump’s hair on “The Tonight Show.”

OJ Simpson is having a very big night, in spite of the fact I imagine he was rooting for his ongoing biography, “Orange Is The New Black” this year.

Like Vladimir Putin, Hugh Laurie is having some fun at the expense of our electoral system… and is being cut off by the orchestra. Where were they in November? “I’m sorry, sir, I think you’ve had too much to vote…”

I wish O’Fallon would stop doing impressions. Like sidewalk mimes and walking in on your parents masturbating, it just makes me uncomfortable.

“Lala Land” is picking up lots of gold. Any chance it’s a movie about the film industry? Hollywood loves handing out laurels to movies about itself.

Iggy Pop is up for a Golden Globe? Need to rewind!

I think I like the Globes because most of the people in the room have been drinking for hours by the time the show starts.

I also like Kirsten Thomas’s plunging, rectangular neckline. In-side boob!

Goldie Hawn is unrecognizable, and still playing the ditsy blonde. Draw your own conclusions.

Ryan Gosling came dressed to win. Holy Humphrey Bogart! Man, and he crushed his acceptance speech, too! Who is this guy??

Kirsten Wig and Steve Carrell killed their comedy bit, which could have died a horrible death in less adroit hands.

Ooh, Thor and Wonder Woman, side by side. What a movie that would be!! And then I’m pretty sure Loki won the next award. Hmmmm… patterns, threads connecting…

I wish the winners would stop thanking people and get straight away to their political opinions. Loki’s acceptance speech was pure gold.

How is Jake Gyllenhall still a Thing?

Still waiting for the first nominated show or movie I’ve actually seen to win an award. Am I still a Thing?

Fucking a, even the best TV Drama category, where I’ve seen about half the shows, biffs it. So far it’s a great night for OJ, Anglophiles and facial hair.

Man, the writing on this show is lame to the point where one sentence opens with extolling someone’s artistry and ends with it ending with something about being an artist. It’s laughably lazy writing. Actually, if this one speech was a drinking game, ‘artist’ would not be the safe-word.

This year’s Lifetime Award goes to a very hale and hearty-looking Meryl Streep. Wow, her voice is all fucked up. I hope it’s a movie thing and that I haven’t misjudged her apparent health. She just celebrated the awards show’s debt to hollow, vainglorious narcissism by devoting a good portion of her acceptance speech to president-elect Trump. And now she’s calling out the press! That’s two for two, Ms Streep. And she closes with a Carrie Fisher quote. She never disappoints.

Okay, there are officially too many beards this year. Captain Kirk looks silly. As does Batman. Oh please, stop.

Mel Gibson sighting! In a category with about ten other people, and I’ve never heard of the winner or his movie before tonight. Thanks, Hollywood Press!

Ooh! Nick Nolte! Looking wonderfully haggard and unkempt, just the way I like my Nick Nolte.

I guess I should see “Lala Land,” huh? I do like well-done musicals.

Bradley Pitt is in boring-ass mode, wasting his charm.

Surprise! “Lala Land” won one of the Best Picture Awards. My recording is gonna cut off before this thing is over. Shit.

Leo is boring too. Boo! Announcing another winner I’ve never heard of.

And that’s it! 5 more minutes of commercials then the end of the recording.

Except for Meryl going all I’m-With-Her, a pretty boring affair by Globes standards. Lose O’Fallon next year and let’s see some winners Joe and Jane Sixpacks like me have actually heard of.

Or at least, more side-boob.

Leonard Cohen—A remembrance

The first time I heard the name Leonard Cohen—known these days mainly as the composer of “Hallelujah,” one of most-covered songs of the modern era—was back in the early 1990s. A fellow who worked alongside me told me about going to a coffeehouse with his girlfriend the day before, and all she and her friends did was discuss the merits and meaning of various snippets of ‘Leonard Cohen’ lyrics. We had a good laugh at people who went to coffeehouses to discuss minutiae relating to artists nobody had ever heard of; plus this guy was supposed to have been a poet, too. Please.

For a while we mocked him on general principle; we were young, we mocked everything on principle. Somewhere along the way, however, cooler heads prevailed, and we decided to give this new guy a listen… and my friend immediately fell in love with his old stuff while I fell in love with his newer work, which was admittedly over-produced and synthesizer-heavy, but his melodies had grown more agile and memorable, drawing greater attention to the compassion, complexity and humor of the lyrics.

Not too long thereafter we heard this old guy was going to release a new album. We had already totally drunk the Leonard Cohen Kool-Aid by then—although we had the dignity not to let ourselves be overheard discussing the lyrics of an artist nobody had ever heard of—and couldn’t wait. An accompanying tour was announced with a stop in our town and we eagerly grabbed up some tickets as soon as they went on sale.

A couple weeks before the concert, he was on David Letterman’s show to debut the title track of his upcoming CD. He didn’t look at all comfortable and his low growl of a voice got lost in the synthesizer-heavy mix and I started to think about all the money we had spent on concert tickets. He just didn’t have the live performance thing down at all, but hey, he was still a legend, right? People still go see Dylan, who hasn’t delivered an intelligible live show since the ‘70s, so it would still be worth it to be able to say you saw this duffer with the old-fashioned hat. Then a couple minutes into the performance, poor Mr. Cohen began to sing a different part of the song than the backup singers and band were performing. I felt for the guy, but at the same time, I saw my concert money growing wings and flying out the window, like in a Tex Avery cartoon.

A couple weeks went by and we went to the concert, girding ourselves against a worst-case scenario. We noted where all the concession kiosks that sold alcohol were, as well as the bathrooms in case it became necessary to punish our livers to get through the evening.

Happily, it turned out that what Mr. Cohen didn’t do well was live TV. In concert, in a relatively intimate venue, he was a revelation. My specific recollection of the evening’s highlights is somewhat muddied by let’s say time, but I remember he was touring with the same girl-group backup singers and band from his disastrous TV appearance, and that night they were sublime.

His manner was that of a courtly older gentleman; his vocal range a bottomless bass, deeper than the voice of the angry God of the Old Testament. He didn’t drop a word that night, and the more hushed his singing became, the quieter the crowd grew as if we were instruments in an orchestra he was conducting. At every opportunity he introduced his band members by name, by show’s end he had name-checked the entire band at least a half a dozen times each. The girl-group backup singers’ parts were beautifully arranged and they did indeed sound like the angels he referred to them as. He ran through a generous set of hits from a long career that had seen very little mainstream success except in the hands of other people. Neil Diamond, among many others, had a big hit with “Suzanne.” Tori Amos scored with “Famous Blue Raincoat.” And Jeff Buckley was the first major artist to realize the commercial potential of “Hallelujah.”

It didn’t feel so much like a concert as a communal spiritual experience led by an angel choir. Mr. Cohen’s occasion encouragement of his backup choir, “Ah, sing it, angels,” seemed more apt than archaic. He made us feel like having been in attendance had somehow made us both wiser and humbler human beings. To this day, I’ve never felt its like again.

Career-wise, after Mr. Cohen invested the profits from that album and tour, he retreated for the next couple years to a Zen Buddhist temple in the LA area. In an excellent interview (searchable online) by the LA Times’ Robert Hilburn, Mr. Cohen recalls his time there being spent in meditation, writing poetry and making soup for the head yogi. He says they accommodated his celebrity to the extent that the monks took two of the closet-sized rooms they inhabited and knocked out the wall separating them, creating for Mr. Cohen a double-wide closet-sized room.

A few years later, Tom Waits was on tour and a bunch of my friends and I had made the pilgrimage to see the show. We had lousy seats way in back, but someone in our group spotted Mr. Cohen in the theater, about half-way back sitting with a couple of women. I was coaxed into going over to get his autograph. Now I had lived in Los Angeles for years by then and had never sought out anyone’s autograph. But I marched over to where The Great Man sat, and in order to not have to yell at him or lean menacingly over him, I took a knee when I approached the young woman seated next to him, who was seated on the aisle. After first ascertaining that he was indeed Leonard Cohen, I got her permission to speak to him.

I mean, really. It was like I was meeting the Pope or something. But the calm peacefulness of his demeanor made the fact that I was kneeling before this old man like I was proposing to him seem completely appropriate in the moment. I introduced myself and babbled the usual nonsense a fan would say; he put his hand out and shook mine and spoke words in his basso profondo rumble that for the life of me I cannot remember. I didn’t so much ask him for an autograph as I apologized him for an autograph. Which he gave me which I’m glad I scanned before misplacing it among my papers of the era. I got out of there as quick as I could so as not to draw attention to the celebrity in the audience’s midst. Yes, it was a jaded LA crowd, but it was also Leonard Cohen; his presence would be enough to reduce most attendees at a Tom Waits audience to breathless rubes.

Earlier this year as beloved pop icons were dropping dead left and right, I spoke to a friend who was concerned that we might lose Mr. Cohen this year, too. After all, he was in his 80s and had been working at what for him was a furious pace; 3 albums in the last 5 years, not to mention accompanying back-to-back world tours of 3-hour concerts. And I’ll tell you now what I told her then. I’m not worried about Leonard Cohen. He’s had one foot in Grace for at least the latter half of his life, and this mortal transition would no doubt be embraced by the man himself when his time came. Spiritually speaking, his passing would be a lateral transition at best.

And now the voice has been silenced and the Rubicon crossed. But you’ll never be able to convince me, the next time I’m shaken by an especially bone-rattling crash of thunder, that it isn’t Leonard Cohen and God, sharing a private joke together at the absurdity and beauty of the human condition.

“As I understand it, into the heart of every Christian, Christ comes, and Christ goes. When, by his Grace, the landscape of the heart becomes vast and deep and limitless, then Christ makes His abode in that graceful heart, and His Will prevails. The experience is recognized as Peace. In the absence of this experience much activity arises, divisions of every sort. Outside of the organizational enterprise, which some applaud and some mistrust, stands the figure of Jesus, nailed to a human predicament, summoning the heart to comprehend its own suffering by dissolving itself in a radical confession of hospitality.”
—Leonard Cohen, responding to a question on the ‘state of Christianity’ in an online Q&A