Chagal4's Blog

And so the end of another year is upon us. After seventy or so they tend to blur together. A lot of people will remember 2016 as a ghastly year for very good reasons. The wars and tragedies in the middle east…the refugees…the terrorism…the hurricanes and earth quakes…floods and famines. They’ve all been going on for years now but somehow last year was worse. The divisive and splintered politics in America and elsewhere and the rising tides of xenophobia and racism have combined to promise more anguish in 2017.

We lost a lot of well known people in 2016…and some of us have lost people close to us. Many have died from demogaphics. It’s not a new disease…demographics. It just means that our warrantees are running out. The baby boom produced a huge bump in the population…now they’re reaching an age where the natural wear and tear of life has taken its toll. we wish them well…we hope the ones remaining stick around for awhile longer.

All of us will confront the coming year in our own ways…I hope we can do it together and that we can help each to avoid falling into despair. So I just want to say…

Never Mind

Never mind the madness…It’s a bag of broken glass. It’s a box of broken hammer heads…a jar of rusty nails. It’s a sagging table out on Maxwell Street in 1956 with shrunken heads that could be real…if you’re only fifteen years of age…and painted scraps of splintered sticks…It’s a stack of books with twisted spines…and holes in every page, where mice from several families ate breakfast every day.

Never mind the madness…it’s a restaurant for fools. There’s apple pie with LSD and ice cream filled with weed. And if you doze off long enough they’ll crank you up with speed. There are needles filled with mystery and bottles filled with …need. There are tears behind your eyelids …and when they fall you bleed. There are fingerprints on all the glasses…and noises in the walls. You can’t hear the giant redwood whisper when it begins to lean and …falls.

Never mind the madness…it’s a child with scabby knees…It’s a big black dog with fleas. It’s a little boy with a plastic gun shooting at the rain. It’s trapped inside an elevator full of promises and pain. It’s a wrong number that just keeps ringing. It’s one shoe that doesn’t fit. It’s a man on a corner at midnight swearing at nothing. Or everything. It’s the blinking eye of the shattered head of a doll from long ago.

Never mind the madness…it’s the job you didn’t want…it’s the job you didn’t get. …It’s raining on your one day off…It’s nothing on T.V..It’s murder down the street…It’s kids in cars with pistols and nobody knows who did it…It’s the head-cold that lasts forever. Oh man it’s a toothache and knee repacement. It’s that house at the edge of town with broken windows and sagging doors and something dark behind the curtains.

Never mind the madness…It’s a garage sale of broken pots…it’s a toilet filled with flowers standing on the lawn. Its a baby Jesus in a manger in a tire in the yard…It’s the last of those old Edsels…It’s a coin operated vibrating bed in a humid motel in northern Ontario…that doesn’t work…or doesn’t stop. It’s always, always there…the slippery spot on the sidewalk.

Never mind it all…because there’s so much more. There are mountains with snow capped lids…there are rivers where fish laugh and shadows dance over ripples and pools. There are children born with dimples and gorgeous little fingers and toes…shining eyes and button noses. There are days that take your breath away. There are Sunday markets on Paris side streets that sell olives marinated in magic sauce that make you gasp…and you can’t get the damn things anywhere else. There are sunny days along a bicycle path with friends and the wind in your hair. There are long open roads leading to wave washed beaches…or the great big sky of the prairies. There are French toast breakfasts that take the blues away…There is love…and the ones you love…and in the end…there’s really nothing else.

Never mind…just keep

Going.

It wasn’t even on the list of things I’d hate to hear a week before Christmas. There was no place on that list for it. There have been some horrible things that happened this year and I kinda wanted to put them all to one side and focus James Corden’s Car Karaoke…damn, I just love Adele doing that thing with him. Or maybe watch some kittens on late night T.V. or a couple days of non stop National Geographic. You know…the kind of gibberish that stuns your brain like a five pound sledge hammer between the eyes…(No, No, I mean that about loving that Adele thing with James Corden). So I wasn’t prepared to hear that bug -brain- soon- to- be- leader- of- the- free -world calling for a renewal of the nuclear arms race…and building up the U.S. nuke arsenal until “the world comes to it’s senses”. I didn’t even stop to wonder by what definition this man could determine that the world would come to its senses…Like, would the world have to line up at the gates of Disneyland and kiss his ring and promise to eat at MacDonalds forever?

I remember a sunny summer day in 1958 walking down a street in Detroit. Sirens like a banshee wailing from hell went off, deafening the whole city. You could hear those sirens in Chicago!…Cops ran around like Keystone clowns and rushed cars off the little side street…a kind of small park with shrubs and grass and a few benches ran along the block and suddenly smaller sirens whoop-whooped along with the big ones (which didn’t stop) because this was what Armageddon was supposed to sound like. People stood rooted to the sidewalk and the little park split down the middle and folded open like a giant green clam shell and a gleaming white missile cantilevered out of the earth like a promise from Satan.

We were deep in the heart of the “Red Menace” the ‘”Cold War”and those Russian commies could fly over any time and blast the industrial centre of America into cinders and ash. So this was a test of the warning and response systems. The sirens to blow out our eardrums and the missiles to blow those rascals out of the sky before they could drop their hellacious bombs. I know I felt much safer after that day.

So this is what king Donald meant when he said he wanted to make America great again. More and bigger nuclear weapons to scare the ignorant foreigners back into  a shivering mass of quiet consumers of American goods, services and political wisdom. This means that it is time to invest heavily in apple pie factories.

I was caught, as if in mid stream of a satisfactory pee…my mind kind of froze for a second or so. Did I really hear that right? Are there sane people around the world listening to this shit? Why aren’t they rushing to New York or Washington with buckets of tar and bags of feathers? Blue nosed conservatives want to arrest little girls for exposing their breasts on the internet (nothing as dangerous as a young boob!) and they let this fool say this kind of shit?!!!? What’s up with that?

Oh…and no I don’t think it’s a good idea for young girls to post pictures of their boobs…and I certainly don’t think other people should be sharing and shaming them….but let’s be clear…the danger of a single sordid tweet by this man is in another universe of insanity.