Sean Davis: Recent Episodes
None
Purple Heart recipient and Iraq War veteran Sean Davis talks about his military career, his deployments, and the struggles he had after returning home from war. Not every veteran with PTSD is broken. Many can find ways to cope with their trauma and live with it every day. Some find that helping other people and building community helps.
This interview was recorded while shooting Rogue Cell’s new documentary Battlegrounds & Backroads. For more information on the documentary or veterans’ issues go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/roguecell.
Ever since I got back from the war, I’ve had the sneaking suspicion that I’m not really here. I’ll smell some diesel fuel from an obnoxiously large truck, I’ll see a flash of light, or I’ll feel some quick pain in my side, and I start to believe that somehow I’m still sprawled out on my back in the middle of a badly paved road with the sun glaring down at me. This isn’t real. You’re not real. I think to myself that maybe I’m still in Iraq, right after they blew me up in that ambush in Taji. I think maybe I’m dying slowly and my whole life up to this point has been one big delusion I never deserved, a trick my brain is playing to keep me distracted as I bleed out slowly.
I still think that sometimes, twenty years later.
This was my humvee fifteen minutes after the ambush. I was sitting in the passenger seat. I lived through this. This happens to me when something in my life is going in a positive direction. I know about survivor’s guilt, PTSD, TBI, and all sorts of other depressing acronyms. I even know that feeling like I’m slowly bleeding out in a firefight that occurred almost a generation ago is not rational, but it happens because experiencing, acting, and actively participating in the war means that maybe I don’t deserve good things.
I have a great life. I’ve been married to a very beautiful woman for 17 years, and I live on the Oregon Coast where I get to raise my sixteen-year-old daughter. I have two big dogs and a big expensive house, a house that if I had seen it as a kid I’d never believe it possible that I would ever live in something this nice let alone be able to buy it. And sometimes when I get sad, because that does still happen a lot, I might tell a friend that I shouldn’t be this happy.
And they always say, “Of course you do. You deserve it. All the shit you went through. You deserve it, all right.”
But I don’t believe anyone deserves anything, and the reason is very sad, but I’ll tell you why. If I did deserve something, that belief would light a very long fuse, and that fuse would burn all the way back to those Kurdish kids we saw one day after the Blackhawks dropped us off on the outskirts of Baghdad one morning. What the hell did those children do to deserve what happened to them? And what about Mustafa? Mustafa was just twelve and his parents were killed, so he ran a small shop all by himself behind an Iraqi Police station. I’d go into his shop sometime during every patrol and got to see him almost every single day for months. I even bought him a coffee pot and coffee beans from the PX because Iraqis only drank tea, and I wanted coffee when I stopped by. He was a good kid and always had a hot cup waiting for me.
He was killed when some shit-head drove a car full of 155 shells into the police station and blew it up.
We called this kid “Oh My Shit” because that’s what he always said. I still see the faces of all the children, especially my favorites: Mustafa, Nasim, Omar, and the kid we called “Oh My Shit.” We called him that because he would always say it, “Oh my shit. George Bush, number one!” or “Oh my shit, Davis, there are no bad guys around here,” or “Oh my shit, Davis, Jay Z is the best.” We treated the kids the best we could, gave them money, gave them food, gave them water. They liked us. They liked us so much that they joined the Iraqi Army because they wanted to be soldiers like us. They were no older than my son and daughter were when they sent me to Iraq, but these battle orphans didn’t have birth certificates, so they could say they were old enough to enlist and no one could prove different. Plus, Iraq needed soldiers badly.
Kids would run out to sell us soda anytime we stopped a patrolThey were killed. All of them. And the fuse burns to this big bomb in my head: why did they deserve that? The only answer I can come up with after thinking about it for years is that no one deserves anything. I know that some people might believe this means we live in a chaotic universe without rules, and some people may believe that living in a universe that isn’t governed by some notion of justice by an undefinable higher power is terrifying, but this isn’t true. My truth is that the overwhelming majority of existence makes no sense, and human beings are still here.
We love to believe we can figure all this shit out, but we can’t. Not really. Mankind has invented mathematics, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus, but if you really think about it, we can’t even count to one. Try it. Start at 0.1 and tell me when you get to one. Look at the sun. According to our brightest minds the sun weighs 2.192×1027 tons and the surface temperature is 9,920 degrees fahrenheit, but it floats weightless in a void that averages -455 degrees fahrenheit. Giant balls of fire and gas that weigh more than the human mind can understand zip around in icy nothingness. How the hell do you explain that?
And who the hell are we to think we need to figure it out? We’re not the rule; we are the exception. The universe is 99.99% nothingness. Even we, the little bits of stardust that became sentient meat, are mostly made up of nothing. Every atom in our body is 99.99% empty. All that we are, and all the matter in the universe, is just a rounding error.
So being next to nothing and not believing I deserve anything may sound sad and scary, but it’s the opposite. If I believed that everything happened for a reason and there was some sort of just higher power looking out for me, that would mean that those children deserved to die horribly. If I deserved all that I have right now, doesn’t that justify the war? Doesn’t that justify all wars?
Look, here’s the thing, we get to borrow 7*1027 atoms, give or take, for a limited amount of time, a hundred years or so, and then we have to give them back. The First Law of Thermodynamics says that matter in a closed system can’t be created or destroyed, so all the things that make us us, the star dust, chemicals, and electricity, is on one long journey that only includes us for a miniscule amount of time on this cosmic scale. So, we need to ask ourselves, what are we going to do with that small amount of time you can control?
That said, many people get through their trauma or addiction issues by finding god. I’m happy for them. I wish them the best. I won’t argue with you, and if you bring it up I’ll just smile, nod, and find a polite reason to excuse myself. Who am I to tell you what to believe when I can’t even prove that any of this is real.
Editor: Matty Byloos
“…how brains and blood turn from blue to red when they hit air…”Taji, IraqNAILED MAGAZINE: Tell me about the thing you’ve been obsessed with for the majority of your life. What’s the one thing that’s always playing in a loop somewhere in the back of your mind?
SEAN DAVIS: The fear of a major earthquake ripping cities apart keeps many people up at night. Super volcanoes exploding from under Yosemite, tsunamis a half mile high hitting the West Coast at one hundred miles an hour, or maybe a new super virus that’s resistant to antibiotics and ends up killing millions: these are horrors a civilized person wouldn’t wish on their worst enemies, but through bad luck or fate, I’ve spent most my life in extreme situations. I not only survived, but found I was skilled at dealing with them — and more than that, I loved living through them.
Some people do better after the world ends. I’m one of them. This is my obsession.
At twelve years old, my father took me and my brother out of school to pan for gold, and as far as he was concerned, we were going to pan for gold for the rest of our lives. We lived a Jack London lifestyle. No electricity. All water was from the river. We cooked over campfires twice a day. Shit in the woods. We lived solely off the gold we pulled from the earth, and we did this for months until my father met a group of hippies who’d been hired to look after an illegal pot grow. He befriended them, but after a few weeks, ended up sleeping with someone’s girlfriend or wife.
I remember hearing his far-off screams as he sprinted down the bank of the Sixes River, holding his ass. He’d been buckshot, stung by a hundred steel little bees, right in the ass. He was yelling at me to grab the gold and get in the car. We were leaving.
The first time I saw a man die, I was thirteen. He stood on a flatbed of a truck and the driver let the clutch out too fast making it lurch. The man landed on his skull and I’ll always remember how brains and blood turn from blue to red when they hit the air.
By the time I was eighteen, I had driven across the country from east to west and from north to south. I tried to get a job and stay put at twenty, but needed more, so I joined the army. I spent my twenty-first birthday patrolling with an M16 in my hand through Port au Prince in Haiti, during their revolution. I patrolled their largest city after their revolution during Mardi Gras. My little nine-man squad forced our way through thousands of drunk and dancing Haitians, full of anger and excitement.
me and my AKFor my second tour in the military, I was a desk sergeant for a police station in a small Bavarian mountain town. This was back when military police did law enforcement. I arrested people, investigated rape cases, and was involved in a car chase. Some civilian dependent kidnapped his own baby and tried to get away.
I left the service and tried hard to go to art school and start a career. I took a job as an incident responder for the Oregon Department of Transportation. Most days, I’d drive in circles on the highways, but when there was a fatal accident, I’d be there to help out and clean up. I once saw a man in a convertible decapitated by a lifted truck. Once the traffic in front of a semi stopped faster than his breaks could slow him down so he pulled the wheel, sending the semi on its side on the shoulder of the road where I was parked. It slid right at me, stopping only ten feet away. When I ran to it, after it’d finally stopped, I found the driver had broken his neck but was still alive. More than once, I sprayed blood off the asphalt of the public roads with a solution of bleach and water.
Then the attacks of September 11th happened. The horrors of that day gave me an excuse to go back. The first thing I did in the Oregon National Guard was train how to fight wildland fires. A year after that, I led infantrymen in the combat of the Iraq War. Did that until I was blown up.
me at a pipe ruptureI thought that would have gotten whatever it is out of me, but then the biggest hurricane in U.S. history hit landfall, and soon as I was able to walk unassisted, I volunteered to go wade through those flood waters in New Orleans. It was harder than I thought it would be, mentally and physically. So I made a deal with myself to finally buckle down and find a career.
Sean won the 2016 Human Rights Emerging Leader Award from the City of PortlandIn five years time, I had a Master’s degree, and in seven year’s time, I had a wife, a new daughter, a book, and I supported us by teaching writing. I did it. I had pulled away and made a life. But this last year, it called me back. I went through wildland firefighting training yet again, passed the physical tests, and headed out for almost three months.
This summer I lit my cigarette on the largest wildfire in the state of California. Pissed on it too.
Sean on the front lines of the Klondike Fire, 2018If the world ended tomorrow, I would find my way home, put on my kit, and rally. I’ve said on multiple occasions that the only way I’d join the military again is after the world ends. I’m sure I could be at least a colonel in whatever army we survivors create. This isn’t crazy; this is my obsession.
“Reality cannot be ignored except at a price; and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and more terrible becomes the price that must be paid.”
—Aldous Huxley
Dear, Republicans
I’m a middle-aged, straight, white man living in rural America—a former police officer, firefighter, and combat veteran with a Purple Heart from the war in Iraq. In other words, I’m the human embodiment of a Republican campaign ad. I am three different colors in the rainbow of ribbon magnets proudly plastered onto the back of every lifted Dodge Ram from here to Mitch McConnel’s Kentucky plantation. So, hear me out: I’m not here to turn you into a kombucha-brewing, crystal-rubbing, Birkenstock-wearing liberal. I’m not trying to make your kid share a bathroom with a mustachioed boogeyman in a sundress. I’m not here to snatch your guns, raise the price of your eggs, or force you to grasp the mysteries of pronouns. I’m just a guy who fought and bled for this country—and now I’m pissed off at what our political system has become.
Let’s talk about this.
Trump has assembled the worst cabinet in American history, a rogue’s gallery of grifters and incompetents so absurd they make a room full of carnies look like the Harvard faculty lounge. He put a timber baron in charge of the Forest Service—a man who sees trees the way a butcher sees cows. He tried to appoint a guy under investigation for sex trafficking as Attorney General, presumably because the Justice Department was running low on irony. He put an anti-vax heroin addict in charge of Health and Human Services, a man whose medical expertise begins and ends with “just rub some essential oils on it.” He picked an FBI director who openly declared his desire to dismantle the FBI, a bit like hiring a vegan as your barbecue pitmaster. He’s alienated our allies, launched a trade war against our closest partners, and at one point, seriously considered annexing Canada and Greenland—because why not collect the whole set?
Is this what you voted for, Republicans? Really?
I know a Trump supporter who just lost his job due to the DOGE cuts. (Yes, we named a government program after a meme. We deserve everything that’s happening to us.) He has a family of four to support and told me they’ll “adapt,” but still insists he’s sticking with Trump. At what point is the price of loyalty too high? The Dow Jones just plummeted 900 points. Egg prices have more than doubled despite Trump’s Day One promise to fix them. He also vowed to fix immigration, end birthright citizenship, and bring peace to Ukraine. Instead, the only promise he kept was letting every January 6th rioter out of jail. How much more evidence do you need that this is a con? The man lies like it’s a bodily function.
So, I’ve been looking for answers. I turned to the writings of Gustave Mark Gilbert, a Jewish Austrian immigrant’s son who became a psychologist and was sent to the Nuremberg Trials to study the Nazis. He had the unenviable task of trying to understand how an entire nation got bamboozled into fascism. Here’s what Hermann Göring, Hitler’s right-hand man, told him:
Göring: Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life when the best he can hope for is to come back in one piece? But it is the leaders who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a communist regime.
Gilbert: But in a democracy, the people have a say in the matter through their elected representatives.
Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism. It works the same way in any country.
Sound familiar?
The Right is telling its followers that they’re under siege—by the IRS, the FBI, Democrats, LGBTQ+ people, Hollywood, immigrants, teachers, and probably that one guy at Starbucks who always gets their name wrong. They scream about tyranny while handing tax breaks to the billionaires who are actually picking their pockets. They cry “freedom” while pushing laws that dictate what books you can read, what history you’re allowed to learn, and what women can do with their bodies. They’ve taken Propaganda 101 and turned it into a masterclass, amplifying outrage through Fox News, AM radio, and Facebook posts from your Aunt Karen, until their base is convinced that their biggest enemy is a poor kid getting free school lunch.
The GOP used to respect war veterans, love democracy, and care about the little guy chasing the American Dream. Today, you are at the whims of a billionaire, slum lord, draft dodger and an unelected man-child who is using you to tear down our checks and balances so they can make even more money. Wake up, Republicans. You believe that you’re in on the joke. The truth is, you are the punchline.
“Since coming back from overseas, this is more of a foreign country than the places overseas. I don’t understand it. It’s like America has lost faith in rational thought.” ~General Jim Mattis
I know many people believe that Trump is a Russian asset deliberately put in power in the US to alienate our closest allies, sabotage our democracy, and tank the global economy so badly that it helps Russia. But even on the off chance that Trump isn’t a Russian plant, he couldn’t do anything differently to better dismantle democracy. By making threats like taking over Greenland, making Canada our 51st state, and reclaiming the Panama Canal, he is normalizing aggressive and unwanted expansion, the same thing Russia is doing right now in Ukraine. By tanking the US economy, he’s ultimately helping the Russian economy that is bankrupt due to the war in Ukraine. If nothing else, he’ll put us on equal footing when we should have a strong tactical advantage.
We essentially have the world’s largest super power, at the direction of the world’s richest man, cutting off aid to poor and vulnerable people of the world (including our own poor and vulnerable). This administration is cancelling all consumer protection, cancelling out sixty years of civil rights policies, and creating a national movement of anti-intellectualism by getting rid of agencies like the Department of Education and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. If history teaches us anything it’s that if you want to control a population you must ensure they’re not educated.
This morning I found out that Trump is offering special “Trump gold cards” for citizenship. Yours for only five million dollars. He says that with this program he can pay off the national debt of 36 trillion dollars. Now all he has to do is get 7.2 million foreign millionaires to give 5 million dollars to the US government so they can move to a country that is deporting immigrants. Solid plan. If he plans to do this in his term that would mean it would take 5,000 millionaires moving here every day for four years straight. There are only 58 million millionaires on planet Earth, and the United States has 22 million of them. That means there are 36 million millionaires who are not US Citizens which means Trump has to talk one out of every five millionaires into buying his Gold Card right now. They better hurry up because the Republican House just passed a bill that will raise the debt ceiling another four trillion dollars.
I don’t understand how people are okay with any of this. He was elected on the promise that he’d deport up to 20 million immigrants and now he’s selling citizenship for millions of dollars. This means that he just doesn’t like poor people, which is ironic because he makes so many. His tax plan is to cut services and resources to the poor while increasing their taxes so his rich friends can have more money, his friends who couldn’t spend all the money they have in one lifetime. Trump doesn’t look at our country and see a land of opportunity with the potential of finding the American Dream. Trump’s American Dream looks just like the propaganda video he recently shared on his Instagram where there are big golden statues of him and everyone is happy and rich: his plan on annexing the Gaza Strip and turning it into a casino.
Recently I wrote a social media post on how this administration fired employees of the US Forest Service, leaving many of our national parks severely understaffed. A man who served in Iraq with me chimed up, saying that it was all lies. He told me that no full-time employees were being fired. I asked how he knew that, and he said he worked for the forest service. I mentioned that he should be careful because he may lose his job, and he answered by telling me that he was one of the 3,400 people fired by Elon Musk and DOGE. He was a full time employee who lost his job of fourteen years, but he still supports Trump. The conversation ended with me asking him why.
So I would like everyone out there who voted for Trump to know that it’s okay to admit that you were taken for a ride. We’re not a bunch of people who want you to be wrong. We’re not waiting to make fun of you. We simply want what is best for this country, and we see that Trump and his sycophants are not it. At this point in our history it’s not libs vs. conservatives. It’s about making sure the great experiment of democracy keeps going. It’s about giving everyone a chance at the American Dream. It’s about making a life for our children that is better than the one we lived.
I have a unique ability. I lucid dream ideas for new projects. When I have these dreams, I guide the story, add characters, and form arcs. Last night, I had a great dream I would like to turn into a novel or maybe screenplay. Not sure when I can get to it because I am working on four other projects right now, but I wanted to get it down for later.
Aliens have taken over the world. They were sick of watching us kill such a beautiful and special planet full of resources. They really didn’t want to invade and take over, but they felt they had to for our own sake. So they’re now our alien overlords, but they really don’t want to be. They’ve changed the entire world to one communist government with liaisons that act like mayors of different sections around the world. They’re hexagon shaped areas, no gerrymandering bullshit. Each of the liaisons were chosen at random out of a pool of people the aliens had watched for years. The people have no idea why they were chosen but most of them have a sense of responsibility, ethics, and a sense of service. This means that none of them are actual politicians or rich. In this new world, there are no longer any millionaires or billionaires, and there are no poor. Everyone is equal and their needs are fulfilled, so of course there are many, many problems.
The story will revolve around my protagonist, the alien liaison of the Pacific Northwest, and his alien counterpart. The hero of my story has to explain why humans have been doing what they’re doing all this time. Why do we live in a system where the people who work the hardest make the least while the rich keep getting richer just by having money. Why did we base our entire economic system on shiny objects like gold and diamonds? And how did we change it to be based on small pieces of paper that mean nothing? Why does 84% of the planet believe their imaginary friends are divine entities that guide their lives? Our hero discovers that all the alien civilizations in the galaxy have come to the agreed conclusion that earth is an insane asylum, every single human is insane, some just manage their insanity better than others.
On this months of KMUN’s radio show River Writers I went to Ric’s Open Mic or Poets on the Pier and spoke to Jennifer Nightingale. I wanted to be on scene to speak to some really great people and highlight this open mic at WineKraft on Pier 11.
On May 29th, I will be giving a presentation in the Capitol Building in Salem to the Senate Committee On Veterans, Emergency Management, Federal and World Affairs. I got this opportunity because Brad and I are on the steering committee for Together with Veterans Northwest Oregon, and we’re doing a documentary with the mission to reduce and even end veteran suicide in rural Oregon.
The point I would like to make is that veterans in rural Oregon can find purpose and identity by serving in their communities. And by doing this their rural community will benefit. My problem is that I need help coming up with an ask at the end of our presentation. Something that these senators can do, so nothing that would need a large amount of funding. I’m going to paste my remarks here. Please give them a read and then help us come up with something realistic to ask this committee. You can email me at sean@seandaviswriter.com
IntroMr. chairman and the rest of the committee, thank you for letting us be here today.
My name is Sean Davis. I was raised in Central Oregon in a small town called McKenzie Bridge on the McKenzie River. My dad and uncles were loggers and I fully expected to be one too, but the logging stopped for the most part and I ended up joining the military like 70 percent of my graduating class. It was an easy way to make enough money to have a family.
I spent six years in the Regular Army with deployments around the world from Hawaii, to Upstate New York, to Haiti, to a small base in Germany. I got out in January of 1999, but reenlisted the day after September 11th, 2001 and did six more years as an infantry squad leader and platoon sergeant. I went to Iraq and was critically injured during an ambush that killed a friend and injured a half dozen others. My unit got back and when I was able to walk again, Hurricane Katrina happened and we were sent to New Orleans to help save lives. It was in New Orleans that I realized I could no longer be Sergeant Davis. I couldn’t do it physically, mentally, or even spiritually.
I came home soul-wrecked. I lost my identity and my purpose in life. I had severe PTSD from the firefights, the month-long mortar attacks, and all the dead I saw, some my friends, some enemies, some were children.
I had survived the war, but I wasn’t living. I was surviving every day, carrying survivor’s guilt, immense rage, and again loss of identity and purpose. I had several plans on how to kill myself and lived a very self-destructive lifestyle.
One morning I remember having a long conversation with myself at 3 in the morning. It ended with me saying, either do it, or get on with your life. Find a way to get through this. The VA helped me, and I used my benefits. Within 4 years I got my associates, my bachelors, and my masters degree, but then what? I started teaching college but I still had something missing.
I realized that I still wanted to serve. I found that helping others in my community gave me back my purpose and identity. I became the commander for an American Legion in Portland and we had a food pantry, we did clothing and blood drives, and one winter when people were freezing to death on our streets, we turned our post into a homeless shelter. We had forty homeless people a night, we were without a doubt saving lives. In the summer I joined a crew and for years I helped communities by fighting wildland fires.
Post 134 Food Pantry. One of three closets.My point is that I found purpose and identity again through community service. Today I live in Astoria and my family and I still volunteer to help veterans. Brad and I are on the board of Together with Veterans Northwest Oregon, and we drove 1500 miles around our state speaking to other veterans who are serving in their communities. We want to show any veterans out there who may be struggling that they can help themselves while helping their communities. Here is a few photos and a video clip from what we’ve shot so far.
(We’re working on the presentation now)
Final SpeechWe found, in our travels, that Oregon has a lot of veterans in rural areas. Ten percent of Clatsop County’s population are veterans. Ten percent of Tillamook County consists of veterans. For Columbia County it’s twelve percent. And that’s just the North Coast. Only four percent of the US population are veterans. That means that rural Oregon doubles and even triples the national average for veterans.
Most of our state’s veteran outreach is helping veterans get their disability payments from the VA. Full disclosure, I am 90 percent in my disability ratings for physical and mental issues caused by over a decade in the infantry. I fully understand and appreciate that the financial stability is vital to our disabled veterans. I understand that the VA money coming to our vets through their disability checks is good for the Oregon economy, but I believe that we concentrate too much on our veterans’ disabilities and not on their capabilities.
When your a disabled veteran and you can’t hold a job, you have your disabled veteran license plates and your card, when you find your identity again, you believe that you’re disabled. That becomes who you are, the crazy, disabled war veteran.
I want to go back to something I said earlier, about the time we turned our American Legion post into a homeless shelter. I was very naive. I believed that if I turned on a coffee pot and put some soup in a crock pot, I could run a homeless shelter. I believed I would have 3 or maybe five people at the most, but that first night we had 20, second night 30, after that 40 people a night for weeks. These people had addiction issues, mental health issues, and many other problems. I needed help. The veterans in my community, those guys sitting at home unable to hold a job, these disabled vets, they came and started working 18 hour shifts, volunteering. We got death threats, we were robbed, and other problems, but we did it. We were so successful and collected so much food and clothes that we sent people to drop food and clothing off at city and county shelters. Governor Kulongowski came in to check out what we were doing and he gave the coat off his back to a homeless man.
Another example: when my town burned down in the Holiday Farm Fire in 2020, it was the veterans who organized a daily group of volunteers to help feed the livestock left behind, to clear roads, to help people in any way they could.
A few other combat veterans and I saw federal troops gassing protestors in Portland, and we started the Wall of Vets. I’ve been to Washington D.C. three times to lobby for the end of our forever wars and the Oregon Wildlands Act.
Sean on the front lines of the Klondike Fire, 2018Sean with Governor Kate BrownSean and Darcelleveteran outreachSean with Senator Ron WydenSean with Portland Mayor Ted WheelerSean on the floor of the US SenateSean at Spokane Tribes Pow Wow, 2015Sean with former Portland Mayor Bud ClarkSean won the 2016 Human Rights Emerging Leader Award from the City of PortlandMayoral Candidate SeanFirefighting in the Gorge, OregonSean and Congressman Earl BlumenauerMy point is that we can solve a problem with a problem. We can give veterans a purpose and identity by creating spaces for them to volunteer in their communities, and at the same time, we can help our communities by tapping an untapped resource: our veterans.
The ODVA has a veteran volunteer program, but it’s solely geared to help veterans get benefits and put in claims for disability payments. While I believe that is essential, we should also be creating opportunities for veterans to use their unique skill sets they learned from their military education and experience.
We would like to ask you…
Last night at the Writers’ Guild Initiative annual fundraiser gala, a couple of actors read a story of mine on stage. Peter Friedman and James Yaegashi read a piece of my new memoir about the time I went to the Mental Hygiene clinic in Portland.
In The Wax Bullet War, I think I was still too close to all that combat. I put that book through a filter. I still like the book, but for this new memoir, I’m trying to be as real and raw as possible.
I heard the piece went over very well and people were talking about it. I had just been to NYC last month and I’ve been so busy with our new documentary that I wasn’t able to make it to the gala this year, but I’m so honored it helped raise money for WGI and that such cool actors read the piece. The story is below.
Twist of Fate
So when I write about the war I jump all over times and places. I mean, chronology has no meaning when writing or even thinking about the war, but I found most books written by combat veterans ping around: Slaughterhouse Five, The Things They Carried, Paco’s Story, Catch 22.
So in this one moment, I’m in the low ceiling parking structure of the Portland VA hospital up on what we call Pill Hill. Deep in the bowels of the parking garage lies the Mental Hygiene Clinic. It’s the year 2004. I’ve been back from Iraq for a few months, but my unit is still fighting in the war without me. The Army sent me home early from Iraq because some people blew me up in an ambush. My ribs are still cracked, my right arm and right leg are in casts, but I’m not at the VA because of my physical injuries.
I’ve been a ghost of myself haunting my loved ones since coming back from the Army hospital in Fort Hood (now Fort Cavazos). Coming home soul-broke and getting divorced was bad enough, but not as bad as not being the dad my kids deserve. My son is only ten, and my daughter is only eight. What’s a divorce going to do to them? I don’t have the strength to keep my shit together, and this is a source of great shame.
A couple months before this moment at the VA filled with suicidal ideations, I was blown up and shot at very frequently until one day, men I never met stuffed an old Toyota Landcruiser full of explosives, and when I drove by while on patrol, they exploded the truck, sending my two and a half ton humvee fifteen feet into the air. Then they shot at us with machine guns and blew some more shit up.
My heart beats as fast as the machine gunfire, and blood spurts out of the compound break in my right wrist. This moment of hell stretches and changes the way I experience time for the rest of my life. Today, even twenty years later, I can’t tell if I’ve been carrying large pieces of that moment with me this whole time like some hopeless burdened beast, or maybe I left large pieces of me back on that Iraqi highway on June 13th, 2004.
The problem I’m having is that I can’t get the loop to stop in my brain. Flashbacks aren’t like the ones they show in the movies. You don’t just space out and lose yourself in the trauma. For me, the death and destruction, the insufferable pain, play nonstop on top of the present moment like an overlay. So here I am in the VA’s parking garage in my shitty Toyota revving my engine and thinking about driving as fast as I can into a brick wall.
I’m also in the passenger seat of the humvee telling Corporal Zedwick to skirt this suspicious looking truck.
Cars and trucks with veteran license plates pull in and out of their parking spots.
But I’m coming to after being knocked out, my head on Z’s lap after he pulled me out of the flaming humvee.
I’m staring with way too much intensity at the wall imagining my car crumpling like a beer can when it hits.
I’m also spitting black shit out of my mouth that tastes like battery acid and asking where Eric is. I see his body still sitting in the back of the humvee while smoke from the fire turns his uniform black, but he’s not moving. I scream for him to get out of there. He can’t hear me because he’s dead. The explosion blew the 50 cal off the mount and smashed his skull.
My heart beats so fast and loud that the rush of blood makes everything I hear wobble and distorted. Here and now, then and there, I’m doing my best to keep from screaming. I broke. I’m breaking. I’m broken.
I turn the car off and go into the clinic. I’m already late for my appointment.
High contrast, black and white, framed portraits of elderly veterans hang in the hall that leads to the reception desk. I mumble my last name and the last four of my social security number to the young guy behind the desk. He tells me to sit down and they’ll be with me in a few minutes. The place smells like a new carpet even though the floors are buffed sheet vinyl flooring.
I’m glancing at Fox News, playing on the television, but I’m also watching the secondary IED explode, sending Shane Ward flying like someone threw a ragdoll. I think about thumbing through one of the dog eared copies of People Magazine, but I’m also being loaded into Lieutenant Kent’s humvee while he returns fire on the hood and Winslow calls in the Nine Line Medevac request. Both my legs are bouncing furiously while I sit there, but I’m also screaming at no one in particular, asking,“Where’s Eric? Where’s Eric?”
“He’s dead. He’s fucking dead,” Winslow says.
I punch the windshield even though both my ulna and radius are broken. Each time I hit the glass there’s a sickening snap and blood splatters all over the inside of the truck. I’m screaming in pain, but I can’t stop punching, and at the same time the receptionist calls my name in the lobby of this fucking Mental Hygiene Clinic that they are making me go to because I’ve been exhibiting self-destructive behavior and symptoms of survivors guilt.
Of course now I can jump past the parking garage, the war too sometimes. I do this by overlaying good moments over the bad. Now I’m the grand marshal of a Veterans’ Day parade with my wife Kelly and younger daughter Jackie. Sitting next to us is Cora as a teenager and Karen, Eric’s mother. She only had the one son, so we asked her to adopt all of us. I jump to one of our Christmas mornings where we all unwrap presents and eat the holiday dinner she made for us. I jump to a time where I met up with Karen, her husband Mark, and Jackie in Arcata, California. They had taken her for a summer to the redwoods, and I had a few days off from fighting wildland fires in Northern California.
The farther I move away from the ambush in Iraq, the more moments I build up, the more places I can jump to in time, and now a lot of those places, those memories, are warm and comforting. I’m happy to be here right now, writing these words. That’s huge because PTSD me, thinking about crashing into a wall at the VA and killing himself, never thought he could be happy again.
Instead of ending it, I let time go by. This was immensely harder than it sounds, but I found that every moment that passes is another chance at better moments. I’ve decided that while that day the war almost killed me may always be used while describing me as a person, I don’t need to let it define me.
The Great Experiment and Cognitive Tests All Around
“We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men – not from men who feared to write, to speak…”
~ Edward R. Murrow
As I watch the news cycle spinning, wobbling, and turning, I’m absolutely dumbstruck by the fact that a man who has been twice impeached, gone bankrupt six times, indicted four times, and charged with 91 felonies is still the front runner for the Republicans for the presidency. There are so many reasons why this guy is so obviously wrong for the job, but it seems no matter what happens, the GOP won’t change their minds on making him their candidate. Usually I would love for them to pick a candidate so ignorant, uneducated, and unethical, but the problem here is there’s a very real chance that he could win. Around 150 million voters backed him in 2020, and most of those people stick with him today. These people who voted for this morally bankrupt narcissist, who gives hushmoney to porn stars for sex while his wife is pregnant freaked out and said Barack Obama was acting unpresidential by wearing a tan suit. Even though it is impossible to convince most Republicans of this, I feel I must point out a couple obvious restrictions that we should have in our political system. Maybe let’s start with some sort of moral clause that says our president shouldn’t give hushmoney to porn stars for sex. I’m just spitballing here, but maybe we should not let a person who has been indicted for criminal acts run for president. I really don’t think that it’s infringing on a person’s freedom of speech to tell them that when they have 91 felony counts in four different criminal investigations they can’t run for the President of the United States.
Shouldn’t it be something everyone could get behind to say that a person who is ordered by the verdict of a jury to pay 90 million dollars to a woman he sexually assaulted can’t run for office? Or maybe don’t let someone be a candidate for office who is under investigation by twenty women accusing him of sexual assault and rape. Or maybe don’t let someone run for office who openly brags about grabbing women by the pussy.
The dude wants to be the leader of the free world, but other than dodging the draft for the Vietnam War, the only foreign policy he seems to have is to encourage Russia to attack our NATO allies, an organization, by the way, that was formed due to the threat of aggression from the Soviet Union. He said the reason he would encourage Russia to invade one of our NATO allies is because “You gotta pay. You got to pay your bills.” He’s saying that many of our allies are not paying some imaginary NATO bill. There is no bill. He fundamentally misunderstands a very integral treaty. The only thing that he can be talking about is an agreement made years before he ran for president the first time. After Russia illegally annexed Crimea, the NATO Heads of State all agreed to commit 2% of each country’s Gross Domestic Product to defense spending in order to make sure their militaries are updated in case of a larger war. Not all of our allies have been able to do this yet, but they all have made progress. No one is in arrears; no one is delinquent on paying some bill for services owed. No, not like the Trump Organization that has been sued over 35,000 times for not paying their bills. Maybe don’t let a man who has tanked so many businesses be in charge of the US Economy? I mean, am I going insane here or is that a bad idea? If you don’t believe me, look at his track record. Remember when he started a pointless trade war with China for no reason that lost thousands of American jobs?
I’m sorry, but I’m having a hard time believing that I have to tell anyone, let alone half the US population, that we should not be voting for the candidate who says he will encourage Russia to attack our allies. Deconstruct this: if Canada doesn’t take money away from other government programs like feeding the poor, fixing their infrastructure, or healthcare programs and put that money into their defense budget, Trump says he will encourage Russia to invade and maybe occupy them. Maybe Canada is an extreme example. Let’s list other NATO allies: Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Montenegro, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. Would it be okay for Russian troops to invade any of those democratic sovereign countries? According to Trump, yes, unless they cough up 2% of their GDP. That’s literal protection money, and in law that’s called extortion. Shouldn’t calling for extorting our allies under threat of Russian invasion be a deal breaker when running for any office?
I watch this guy on the news bragging to his voters that he’s passed cognitive tests and somehow that makes him a stable genius, but I know that these tests are given to victims of head trauma after injuries or patients with a loss of mental acuity due to illness. I know this because after I got back from the Iraq War and wanted to use my VA benefits to get my bachelor’s degree, the VA wanted to make sure they weren’t throwing their money away by sending someone with brain damage to college. The test is not hard. Take it yourself by clicking here. Nikki Haley has taken to distributing this test at her rallies.
I can’t believe this, but I agree with Trump. All politicians who want to run for president should take a cognitive test, and while we’re at it they should take a basic political literacy test as well. Then the results should be shared. Shouldn’t each person running for office know what that office does before they sign up? I don’t believe Trump would know the three branches of government and what they do. I doubt he knows how many branches of government there are or how many Amendments there are in the Bill of Rights and what they do.
I will go further and say that we should not only test our candidates, but we should also test everyone who votes. I love democracy. I really do, but does it really work when people with no idea how the government functions simply vote for their favorite personality? How the hell do we know that a person is up for the job if we don’t know what the job is? Spoiler Alert: bills shouldn’t be written and cabinet leaders should not be appointed or fired through social media posts. I mean, shouldn’t it be common sense to know when you elect complete idiots nothing gets done? We end up in this mess of the cult of personality instead of actually solving society’s problems. This Congress, in the words of Representative Joe Neguse of Colorado, “This will go down as… the least productive Congress since the Great Depression.” He’s right. In 2023, only 27 bills passed. Compare that to the Congress before that where they passed 364 bills. When Congress is really working, they can pass up to six to seven hundred bills.
If we keep electing clowns, we’ll keep turning our political arena into a circus. We are the Land of the Free, but that doesn’t mean we should be free to be ignorant, free to burn down the country so many fought to create, or free to destroy the Great Experiment we call democracy.
My friend Eric who was killedThey hurried me into a room with more light than I imagined heaven would have. I felt each wobble of the gurney wheels in the fault lines of my broken bones and stared up at the unbearable white, letting it bleach my eyes, hoping that would take my mind off the pain. I had lost too much blood, I had fractures, shrapnel wounds, breaks, and burns, but my wrist had been so badly damaged that it needed the most attention. The silhouette of a surgeon’s head shadowed me for a second, while some assistant put a mask over my mouth and nose and swung my arm out on the right wing of the stainless steel table until it locked perpendicular to my body. I lay half crucified, and finally the anger set in. It washed over me as I considered the fact that I had no idea what I might die for.
Time stretched and bunched, flowed and stalled, to the unpredictable rhythm of a morphine drip. I woke again, not knowing how long I had been out. A single thought shook me. My eyes shot open and I looked down. I was relieved to find all four fingers and a thumb sticking out of the cast on my right forearm. They were discolored and swollen to the size of sausages, but all of them were there. Wires, tubes, and shiny metal rods stuck out of the bleached-white sheets on my bed. Machines surrounded me, beeping, humming. There was the low, muffled sound of air being released. The room was beige, with chipped paint in the corners, but other than that it was a hospital room like any I’d seen anywhere else. Small, no windows, white tiled floor.
Before I was completely awake, a pretty half-Asian nurse walked in and stretched on her tiptoes to change my IV. She smiled down at me like an angel.
“You’re awake. Are you in pain?” Her words and smile were so full of pity and pride.
Everything ached, but I could feel the medicine had dulled it. “I’m okay.”
I saw my boots, flak vest, and helmet in a pile in the corner of the room. She saw me looking at them. “We had to cut your uniform off and dispose of it, but we saved those.”
I stared at that pile so long my eyes lost focus.
After a few moments she asked, “Would you like to use a phone to call home?”
Home. The word broke my trance. “A phone?”
“Yes, maybe you’d like to call a loved one?”
I nodded. She left the room for a minute and came back with a big black cell phone in one hand and a plastic bedpan in the other. “Do you need to relieve yourself before you call?”
Relieve yourself. She let the words roll off her tongue like it was the most natural thing in the world. She was really asking if I had to shit, because if I did it would be a two-person operation. There was no getting out of that bed with all the monitors, machines, and braces.
Blood rushed to my face. She must have seen it because she started talking fast about nothing, as if a constant flow of words could stop the embarrassment. The drugs they gave me for the pain usually caused constipation, but sometimes they took a while, she told me. She added that it was all part of her job. She did this all the time. It really wasn’t an issue. I shouldn’t feel bad about it.
Tears came and I hated myself for crying. I tried to hold it back, but I couldn’t. The whole situation seemed so stupid, and there was really no reason for me to bawl like a baby, but I had this flash of anger with no way to do anything about it. Hours before, I was planning and executing combat missions; I’d led men, I’d had the power of life and death, and now I couldn’t even shit by myself.
I turned my head and stared at the pile in the corner while the nurse slid the bedpan under the covers. She told me about the success of the operation on my arm, how it was a testament to the world-class talent in the armed forces combat surgical teams.
The pile of equipment in the corner looked as if the soldier wearing it had suddenly disappeared, letting it all just fall to the floor. The boots, the flak vest, and the helmet on top.
She told me that not many surgical teams in any hospital anywhere would have been able to save my hand.
It felt so unnatural moving my bowels in bed. I could smell the shit.
The boots had the laces cut out, the K pot had black carbon stains on the right side, and the flak vest had small shrapnel holes running up the back.
The rods sticking out of my arm were there to ensure the bone healed correctly, she said. It had been splintered, so they screwed a piece of metal along the radial above and below the fracture.
“I’m done.” I said it so quietly there was no way she could have heard me, so I repeated it louder. “I’m done.”
The wipes she used were warm. I appreciated that.
“That wasn’t hard. I don’t think we’ll have to do that again. Don’t worry,” she said.
Before she left the room she gave me the phone. I held it in my left hand for a while, thinking about whom I should call. Then I realized I didn’t know anyone’s number by heart except little brother Vince’s.
After a few minutes of thinking about it I pushed Vince’s number into the phone. There were a couple clicks and hushed static before a constant clicking, which must have been a substitute for the ring. On the third ring Vince picked up. I could tell I woke him. “Hello?”
“Vince.” It was all I could get out. I hadn’t thought about what I was going to say.
“Philip?”
“I told you they couldn’t kill me,” I said, and laughed, mustering up all the bravado I possibly could.
“What?” He turned very serious.
“They blew me up, shot at me, and even mortared me. My truck was blown up, and a friend of mine…” My voice cracked at the word “friend,” and I had to stop for a moment. When I continued my voice was lower, and grave. “There was an ambush. My friend Eric was killed instantly. I was hurt.”
“Are you okay?”
The fear in his voice put a lump in my throat. “I’m fine. A couple broken bones. I’ll call again later. Tell Mom and Dad that I’m okay. I gotta go.”
I hung up before he could say anything else, closed my eyes, and pressed the phone against my forehead
Chained to the World, and We All Gotta Pull
“It is said that the present is pregnant with the future.”
― Voltaire
My friends Al and Angelica Artero told me once that in the future there will be a new branch of archeology. You see, instead of digging in the dirt and using their little brushes to uncover the bones and artifacts of the past, there will be a new type of archeologist who will search through data in our hard drives and the cloud. These future scientific heroes will sift through our digital history, all our social media posts, all our Tweets or Xs or whatever they’re called, all our MySpace posts, Reddit boards, and chat groups, and they will be searching for reason.
I like this very much because I know that people living in the next century will look back and see us all as mad. My intent with “Dispatches from the Apocalypse” is to let our distant ancestors know that there were some of us living through this wacky shit who understood how mad our times really were. I think so many of us live with a sort of metaphorical myopia. We live so close to so many of our problems that we can’t see the forest for the trees. Case in point: the Republican front runner wins the Iowa primary on Monday Jan 15, 2024, and on Jan 16, 2024, he flies into New York for a civil case to decide how much he needs to pay E. Jean Carroll for defaming her after he sexually assaulted her. The verdict on whether or not he sexually assaulted her isn’t going to be decided. That was decided long ago. In fact, Trump already had to pay Ms. Carroll once. This case happened because after he was found guilty of sexually assaulting her, he defamed her in the media for a second time ‒this time during a CNN town hall while running for president. He did this the day after the first time he had to pay her 5 million dollars for defaming her.
Let’s talk about today: the day I’m writing this article. It’s Wednesday, January 24th, and yesterday Trump won the New Hampshire primary with 54% of Republican votes. Tomorrow in Georgia there’s a motion in his racketeering case, and on Friday the Washington DC Circuit Court is expected to make a ruling on Trump’s claim that all presidents should have absolute immunity for life. I know to you, future digital archeologist, whether or not the leader of the free world should be allowed to assassinate his political rivals with US Special Forces groups seems like a no-brainer, but here in 2024, for 47% of American voters it’s a real nugget scratcher. One side says that the highest office in the land should lead by example and with integrity, and the other says they don’t want to be thrown in jail just because they commit a war crime or two. Watching it in the news, you’d think this is a tougher decision to untangle than the Gordian Knot.
So, if the future digital archeologists do dust off the Dispatches from the Apocalypse, I’d imagine they’d do so to answer a simple question. It would be something like, “How the hell did so many people fall under Trump’s spell?” Well, that question is more complicated than you’d think. It goes back long before Trump even thought about running for office. I can’t tell you where it began, but I do remember when Rush Limbaugh was asked to speak to the freshman class of the GOP House of Representatives. He showed them how useful a tool it is to validate the hate and anger in the hearts of their constituents. He taught them and every GOP Representative afterward that compromise is weakness. He told them that you didn’t have to be right as long as you were loud.
But our problems didn’t just come from extreme conservative media hosts. If someone really wants to learn about the issues that affect them politically, they jump on the internet. The problem there is that all the well-written articles by intelligent people with journalistic ethics are cut off by paywalls, and all the insane, badly written, paranoid conspiracies are not only free to read about, but there are literally hundreds of thousands of videos out there by amateurs with little or no credentials and absolutely no journalistic ethics, no ethics at all really. These content creators are driven by a motivation to get clicks because clicks equal money. Not only that, but the platforms have an algorithm that will send them to another equally or even worse video that many times sends the viewer down a rabbit hole. In many cases the people are even radicalized.
Here is one example: early on a Sunday morning, December 4, 2016, a twenty-eight year old factory worker and part time volunteer firefighter left his two daughters at home to drive 350 miles from a small town in South Carolina to Washington D.C. with an assault rifle. He intended to free young women before Hilary Clinton killed and ate them. He believed they were being held in a popular pizza place. Edgar “Maddison” Welch, after being sentenced to four years in prison, told a New York Times reporter that he wasn’t one to believe in conspiracy theories. He said that he had heard something about the Democrats running a child slavery ring by word of mouth. He didn’t know much about it until he finally got the internet hooked up at his house. Then he was able to “research” the problem on 4 Chan, Reddit, and Infowars.
And when we’re not out brainwashing ourselves with confirmation bias, many people fall into the trap set by what is now called infotainment. People with the intent of making millions of dollars and getting famous create shows that traffic in controversy. Then when they are sued or put under investigation, they tell the courts that they are simply entertainers. Tucker Carlson was sued multiple times for telling blatant lies before he was fired. His lawyers defended him by saying that a reasonable person would listen to what he said and decide that it wasn’t true. Amazingly, a U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil agreed saying, “The ‘general tenor’ of the show should then inform a viewer that [Carlson] is not ‘stating actual facts’ about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in ‘exaggeration’ and ‘non-literal commentary.’”
Ignorance isn’t bliss. The real bliss comes from using the ignorance of others to prove something you really want to be true. And even though at least half of us know that talking heads like Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, and others are full of shit, there’s nothing we can do to silence them or people who emulate them.
Don’t worry, future digital archeologist. I understand your confusion. I remember when the second most corrupt president in my lifetime died. Richard Nixon passed in April of 1994 (just months before Rush Limbaugh spoke to Congress), and all the news shows went over the blatant corruption of his administration. The Boomer generation had a near universal contempt for him, and not one person would admit to voting for him even though he won 60.7% of the national vote and 49 states. I suspect that when Trump is finally sentenced to jail time, millions of personal narratives will suddenly change as well. My hope is that when the future looks back at this time, they will be shaking their heads and laughing about how silly we were to let someone like him even think about running for the highest office in the land. I hope they laugh while they pretend to wipe the sweat from their brows and say, “That was close.”
Dispatch 25 – Freedom has Become a Contranym “Americans always try to do the right thing after they’ve tried everything else.” Winston Churchill Just days before the holiday to celebrate freedom, the Supreme Court has again handed down decisions that actively work to take freedom away from vulnerable communities. Handing down decisions that take rights… Continue reading Dispatches from the Apocalypse
Dispatch 23
“The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.”
Pablo Picasso
Conrad Gessner, a Zurich born naturalist, physician, and philologist wrote about the dangers of data overload in the human brain. In his book, he said that an overabundance of information was definitely “confusing and harmful” to a person’s mind. Here’s a scientist arguing that knowing too much can literally and physically break your brain. It’s great irony, but that’s not the important part of this. The important part is that Herr Gessner made his thesis on the evils of too much information back in the mid-1500s. Yes, he was warning us about the printing press and how reading too many books would melt your mind.
When passenger trains were invented, people in the Victorian Era argued against using them, saying that the human body could not physically take traveling at the insane speed of thirty kilometers an hour. News articles appeared in local papers about something called “Railway Madness,” a condition that overcomes mostly males and makes them violent and aggressive for no reason. Other people believed that the speed of the train would make a woman’s uterus fly out of her body.
In 1936, many people argued that the radio would ruin young minds because they wanted to listen to it instead of reading their printed school books. When the television came out, some people believed it would be the end of radio, of reading, of the family unit. I myself can remember arguments and worries on how the internet would destroy our culture, cell phones will turn us into zombies, and social media will rot our brains.
Maybe everyone was right from Gessner on. I honestly can’t argue that humanity is better off with all these technological advances, but I can tell you definitively that we’re still here and we still live with all these things. There’s never been a discovery that mankind hasn’t said, “You know what, I have no idea what the long term effects are here, so I’m just gonna shelf this one.”
I illustrate a lot. All of the funny drawings on each of the Dispatches of the Apocalypse were drawn by me using an XP-PEN Art Pro 15.6 drawing tablet. I love to write fiction and nonfiction stories and I just committed to doing a story slam in March here in Astoria. Sometimes I still paint with acrylics and draw with charcoal. Hell, I used to finger paint, but I like drawing with my tablet using Adobe Photoshop now.
I see, on social media, people sharing digital art they created using Artificial Intelligence generators and apps. I see a lot undisciplined, unskilled, and honestly, unartistic people creating amazing images by typing in a couple words, and then they share it on Facebook or Instagram, claiming some sort of authorship. I saw someone say they were an AI Art Curator.
I can see how this may upset artists that spend weeks or months on pieces that can be spit out in milliseconds now. Why would someone want to buy someone else’s version of art when you can ask a computer for exactly what you’re looking for?
I don’t believe we can stop this any more than we could stop a train, or the radio, or streaming television. AI art is here and it’s not going anywhere.
I’m not writing this in order to try to unring that bell. I don’t want to ignore the fact that these AI generated images may hurt some artists’ bottom line, but I don’t think that is the most serious part of this problem. You know, when we started this conversation about AI decades ago, society collectively believed that robots would do the remedial work that humans didn’t want to do.
According to popular culture, they would be a positive force in our civilization’s evolution, you know, if we could only keep them from turning on us once they realize how the human race is comprised of a bunch of crazy assholes who are actively and enthusiastically destroying the planet they live on, killing dozens of species of plants and animals every single year, exploiting their own poor to make the rich richer, and declaring war on each other every other year since our history started. So barring a robot uprising, Artificial Intelligence is a part of a utopian dream to make human life better.
My problem with AI art isn’t that someone is going to buy some computer generated Steampunk Version of Batman instead of one of my goofy Bigfoot stickers or overly symbolic digital illustrations; my big problem is that I believe the human mind needs the process of creating art to keep us human. We also need to look at someone else’s art and think about why they did what they did. You don’t have either of these with AI art.
Follow me here, I had a hard childhood, but drawing and writing helped me out. Reading and appreciating art helped me. I was always artistic before and during my time in the military, but during the war I experienced some very horrible and life changing events. After coming back, the experts couldn’t put me back how I was, and I spoke to a lot of them. They did tests. I spoke to support groups and specialists, but none of it helped me make sense of life anymore. I was heading toward ending it because nothing helped me until I started writing and painting again.
On an individual level, art is a cathartic and healing way to share the pieces of our spirit we can’t put into words. It’s a connection bigger than ourselves on a level we might not even understand. On a societal level, art is the soul of the society it’s from. It’s a snapshot of an epoch. And the benefit from art isn’t the product. That’s the unique thing about it. The benefits from art come from the process of creating it, and it comes from the contemplation of whoever is reading or observing it.
We were told by scientists and sci-fi writers that Artificial Intelligence would start taking over remedial jobs, but what I’ve seen so far, AI is creating portraits that used to be painted or illustrated by commissioned artists. It’s written poetry, songs, and movie scripts. It’s de-aging actors.
Instead of hitting us at the bottom of our Hierarchy of Needs, they’ve hit us at the top. I think that it’s more dangerous for AI to take away our art and dreams than it would be if they sent Terminators.
I don’t know how we can keep mankind from losing these benefits, but I do know that once they’re gone we may not be human anymore. I hope smarter people than me are working on it (is it smarter people than me or smarter people than I?) I don’t know. I’m just asking that you, whoever may be reading this, don’t give the power of art away to an app on your phone or ChatGPT. I mean, go ahead, we’re all curious, find out what the cast of Xena, Warrior Princess would look like if it were cast in the 1960s, but after you have a little bit of fun make art a priority in your life. Either create it yourself, or read it in a book, or go to a gallery. Or better yet find a local showing and talk to the artist and maybe buy something.
Book of Ferdinand 4
“What’d you do?” Asks a hoarse voice.
“huh?” Ferdinand grunts.
“What’d you do?”
Ferdinand opens his eyes and is surprised to find himself on the floor at the foot of his suite’s bed. His head hurts so bad. It’s as if a red hot bullet had ripped through the skin and bone at his left temple and traveled at a high rate of speed tearing through brain tissue, and then exiting through his right temple, and then it all healed up just as fast.
He blinks his eyes repeatedly. His hands instinctively shoot to his head to feel for holes and blood and brain and whatnot. He can’t find a single thing wrong.
“What happened here, doctor?”
Ferdinand’s attention goes from the hole in the wall to the rotting hulk standing over him. “What?… what are you doing here?… How did you find me?”
A proud smile spreads across his blistered and dirty face.
“I asked you how in the hell did you get in here.”
“The crow told me I’d lose you and find you again in the desert sand without sand! The hotel is called the Sands. It wasn’t hard to find. Everyone trips over themselves to help you when they think you have leprosy. The doorman let me in. I told him that I was your patient,” Bertram explains, very pleased with himself. “So, uh, why did you shoot the wall?”
Ferdinand looks back at the hole in the wall. Then he looks below it. On the floor was a print of Monet’s “Water Lilies.” The original was 87.6 x 92.7 cm (34 1/2 x 36 1/2 in) but the print was 24 inches by 26 inches so it would fit the cheap frame. The glass was shattered and scattered over the carpet. The sun from the window reflected off the shards. “That putrid fucker. No, I do not believe it. My cowardice must have caused me to jerk my hand at the last instance… making me miss… I shot the painting… it won’t happen again.”
Ferdinand puts the gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger.
BANG.
Book of Ferdinand 3Thousands of people hurry down the streets of Las Vegas like blood cells through a vein, but the crowd parts around two men in particular. They give a small Frenchman in a dusty black suit, and a hulking young man who must have escaped from a monster movie plenty of space.
“Go away, you black beast… Whatever you have in mind, it is not going to happen… Go find a different doctor,” Ferdinand says over his shoulder.
“The crow told me that you would be hesitant, but you have nothing to fear, our quest is just and true.”
“Shut up, you lunatic!” Ferdinand yells. This makes more than a few of the people around them jump.
“Doctor Destouches, we must travel to the new Holy Land. It is the will of God. My task is to guide us there and your task is to buy it and deliver the messiah.” Bertram limps after him.
“To buy it?… With what money? I have spent all of the money I had on trying to kill myself… all except what I have in my pocket… which you can have… here.”
Ferdinand reaches into his pocket and gives all the cash he has left to Bertram. He wasn’t going to hire the hookers or do the drugs. He will go straight to his room, say goodbye to Bebert and play one last game of roulette.
Bertram takes the money. “The crow told me to take this money.”
“The crow?… Oh, well, then you better do it… Insanity… all of it…. good, take it and go buy yourself your own Mecca… I’m glad to have done my part… goodbye!” With that Ferdinand leaves, and Bertram hobbles away in the other direction.
Ferdinand walks back to his hotel suite, doing his best to completely deny what just happened. Hank’s a pretty charismatic guy. Ferdinand had always told himself that God didn’t exist, that He couldn’t have existed after all that he had seen during the war, but if he truly doesn’t believe in Him then why did he go through this ridiculous ritual? Wasn’t all of this his way of trying to give God the finger?
No, when he gets back to his room everything will be as it was before. But even if it isn’t a hallucination, it doesn’t change anything. The world is still a cesspool where vile creatures take turns raping and murdering each other for their own benefit. Every last dog is out to steal everything from everyone else, that is when they’re not licking their own scrotums.
Ferdinand’s words there. Sorry. This is how he really thinks.
Ferdinand unlocks the door and steps inside his suite. Berbert walks straight up to him and meows.
“You silly boy… You would do good to dislike me.”
He sits down in front of the radio and turns it on. The high pitched voice of Tiny Tim sings “TipToe Through the Tulips” over his ukulele. He changes stations until he finds one reporting the news.
An IRA attack in Belfast. The Watergate scandal unraveling for President Nixon. General Oufkir in Morocco attempts a coup and assassinates King Hassan II. And the USSR explodes another nuclear bomb in Easter Kasakh. Listen to any news long enough and it’ll convince you that the world’s a dumpster fire.
He remembers his days in the mud in France during WWI, the War that Would End All Wars. He laughs at the naivety of man as he cycles through the dead faces of his friends in his mind. Real pain and horror had changed him and once a person has seen the raw brutality and violence man is capable of, it’s easy to let yourself hate the people who haven’t. It’s easy to hate on a global scale.
Then the newsman spoke of the USSR nuclear testing again, but only a few miles away in the Nevada desert, in a place coincidentally named Frenchman Flats, the US has been testing their own nuclear bombs for decades.
I’m going to go off on a quick tangent and then we’ll get back to our suicidal French apostle, or whatever he’s supposed to be in this story. I just want to ask you a question, really. How many nuclear bombs do you think have been exploded purposely? Do you know? I do.
Most people will blurt out two, but then after thinking about it, they’ll say we probably tested a bomb before we used them again Japan. Then they might think other nations have tested them, so they’ll say something like fifty to a hundred.
But not even close. Human beings have been using nuclear bombs on themselves for over half a century. We’ve detonated two thousand and fifty-nine. Yes, 2,059 so far. We’ve spent decades trying to avoid getting nuked by our enemies, all the while we’ve been nuking ourselves. What do you think that much radiation has done to the world? What do you think the cancer rate was before July 16, 1945, the day they tested the first atomic bomb compared to today?
Do you know how many governments have nuclear bombs? Nine. Well, ten if you include Iran. Pakistan said that since India had them, they would develop them too. Just a year before Ferdinand and Bertram met, Pakistani President Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto said, “We will develop Nuclear stockpiles, even if we have to eat grass.” This doesn’t have anything to do with the story, but what does it say about a nation when their leader would let their people starve and use the money and resources to instead create nuclear missiles?
Ferdinand leaves the radio on, reaches into the drawer where the Gideon’s put their bible, and picks up his .38 Special and bullets. He pushes the drawer shut and the noise startles Bebert. The cat runs underneath the bed. “Sorry, Bebert, but I must fix our little game… We are now up to one hundred percent.”
He puts all six bullets into the cylinder and locks it back into place. Then, just for fun he spins it. With his left hand, he puts the barrel to his left temple. “Honi soit qui mal y pense.”
BANG!
Book of Ferdinand 2
Ferdinand checks into a suite at the Sands and starts the cycle again. Going into his fourth week, the game has grown tiresome. He plays craps, roulette and some games he’d never heard of before. The intent is never to win.
On the afternoon of the third day, Ferdinand stumbles out into Fremont Street looking for a fight. Alcohol makes him sick and gives him awful headaches due to a head injury he received in the war. He hadn’t drank since 1929. He hates the stuff, but again the point isn’t to have fun.
So many people walk around him. He can’t decide on which one to punch in the face. The steady tone in his ears he’d had since the war is now a thousand trombones. He tries to shake them out but it doesn’t work.
Then a stocky older man in a white suit catches his eye. He’s a little taller than Ferdinand at 5’10” and he carries an extra forty pounds in a big belly. His skin is pockmarked, his nose big and red, and his beard grows in brown and gray patches around his almost ape-like mouth. He just stands there with his hair slicked back, staring at Ferdinand with a slight smile, holding a tall glass of ice water.
Ferdinand crosses Fremont Street to confront the man in the white suit. Everything about him annoys Ferdinand. He marches with purpose, deciding to make that son of a bitch pay. Ferdinand stops three feet away, and there they stand, looking at each other as everyone else on the strip bustles by, not paying attention to either of them.
“Well… what are you looking at… you putrid ass licker?” Ferdinand slurs lifting his chin.
“You don’t want any of this pal. I’ll kick your ass eight ways to Sunday.” The man in the white suit smiles.
Ferdinand’s intense hate combined with his complete inebriation keeps him from noticing that they aren’t on the busy strip anymore. The casinos, hotels, streets, cars and people have melted away. Somehow they are now twenty miles southwest, a little past where the city becomes the desert.
Ferdinand starts at the man in white, but the man holds up a single finger, signaling he needs a second. Ferdinand stops despite his unbridled rage while his opponent sets a tall glass of ice water down on a flat rock in the sand.
The Frenchman lunges and connects with a hard right into the other man’s gut and finishes the old one-two with a left to the face. The man in white stumbles back, shakes it off, and laughs. They take turns giving each other a wailing. Ferdinand hopes he can skip the rest of his ritual by dying right here in this fight, and the way his heart pounds, he may die any moment. He couldn’t have fought harder even if someone told him who he was fighting, but after five minutes of swinging and getting hit, his arms are lead.
When Ferdinand can’t punch anymore the two men grapple and fall to the ground to wrestle in the sand. They roll a couple times and finally separate. A few moments go by where they sit three feet apart, staring at each other, and sucking the air for breath.
“Whoa, now, that was a hell of a tussle,” The man in the white suit says between breaths.
Ferdinand, his elbows on his knees, tries to regain control of his breathing. He’s never fought this long or hard in any of his other fights. The salty copper taste is somewhere in his bottom row of teeth. He brushes his wild bangs out of his face and looks around. “Where the hell are we?”
The man in white stands and brushes himself off. “So what’s all this about, Ferdinand? Why do you want to go and off yourself so bad?”
Ferdinand jumps up on his feet, amazed that the stranger knows his name. Then he notices the ringing in his head has stopped. Not only that, but he isn’t drunk anymore. “Who are you?”
“Ego sum qui sum.” The man says.
“J’en ai marre.” Ferdinand responds.
“Aya Ashir Aya.”
“Hebrew?” Ferdinand spits, “So you’re a Jew? I hate Jews.”
“I know. You need to work on that.” The man laughs. An awkward silence hangs between them for a moment until then the man in white continues, “So, uh, I’m God, but you can call me Hank.”
“I’ll call you a lunatic.” Ferdinand brushes the sand off his black suit jacket and straightens out his tie and tugs the bottom of his jacket to make it straight. Then he starts walking back to the city.
“Ferdinand, I need you to stay out here for a couple of minutes.”
“I don’t care what you need… I have prior obligations to see to.” He keeps walking without turning around. He takes three steps, and Hank is in front of him again.
“Yeah, I know you got to get back, rent some whores, and then try to shoot yourself in the head. I give you points for originality, but I just can’t let you do that. I need you for a job.”
“This is ridiculous… I don’t care.” Ferdinand stomps past him toward the city.
“Fine, but where are you going?” Hank asks.
Suddenly the city isn’t there anymore. Bewildered, Ferdinand spins around searching the horizon. Nothing but hundreds of miles of sand.
Ferdinand turns to Hank, “It’s not real… It’s all a hallucination… or maybe I finally did it… I must be dead.”
“That’s pretty much what they all think at this point,” Hank says, pulling out a brown cigarillo and lighting it.
Ferdinand screams, “If you are God Almighty then shouldn’t you be out ruling the universe or something?”
“It’s kind of on autopilot. I’m not really a micromanager.”
“Why don’t you go find someone who believes in you… Because I do not… You’re wasting your time here, stinker… I don’t want to help you or be a part of any scheme you are concocting… Make the city return so I can go shoot myself in the head.”
“You really have gone out of your way to get the attention of a God you don’t believe in. Sorry, and you’re already a part of the plan, buddy. And you don’t have to be a saint for me to talk to you. Actually, I kind of think those types are boring. I used to hang with Lot smack dab in the middle of Sodom. Or Gomorrah. Honestly, I can’t remember. I’m not very good with history. Anyway I find that people are a lot like a pane of glass.”
“Fragile and dirty? Yes.”
“No, I mean they’re more interesting after they’re broken. If you see a bunch of shards of glass on the ground you can’t help but look at it sparkle and shit. You have all those shapes, each one is unique, reflecting light in all directions. If they’re not broken, well, then you can see right through them.”
“Oh this is wonderful.” Ferdinand throws his hands in the air. “Philosophy, the second biggest waste of time.”
“Religion being the first.”
“Don’t read my mind… Do not do that.” Ferdinand shakes his finger at Hank.
“Sorry.”
Ferdinand looks off at the horizon again, but all he sees is sand. He runs his hand through his hair and sighs. “Now what?”
“We’re entering the digital age and it’s time for humanity to grow up, so I’m trying one last time. After this I’m done. The kids gotta start thinking for themselves. After this no more messiahs, no more holy books, no more churches, no more bailing you out, nothing. I give the planet to the bugs. You understand?”
“No… not at all… the universe is being run by a psychotic fool… and what’s more I don’t care… I am not going to try and decipher any of your ramblings… I am here for one reason only.”
“Yeah, well,” Hank exhales a long plume of smoke, “I’m not going to let you do that. In fact, you are not going to get one day older, not until you finish this job.”
Then Hank’s gone.
“Insanity, he says he won’t let me die but then he leaves me in the middle of a wasteland.” He sits down and shakes his head. He looks up at the searing sun and takes his black jacket off. That’s when he remembers the glass of ice water.
It’s still there. The ice hasn’t even melted somehow. He gets up, walks over and picks it up.
He starts to lift it to his lips but stops when he notices a ghastly figure walking toward him from out of the scorching desert. This hulking figure emerges from the wavy lines of a desert mirage. Such a strange pathetic sight, a single man in soiled and ripped slacks and a striped blue shirt with a ragged navy blue necktie. This man, dressed like a horrorshow in rags and tatters with red blistering skin, peeling off his face and hands, and what looks like gangrene on his exposed shoulder, limps right up to him. It makes absolutely no sense. But that is the theme of the day. Ferdinand is so stunned he doesn’t move, not even when the man shambles up and takes the glass of ice water from his hand and drinks it all down. Then he chews greedily on the ice cubes.
“My name is Bertram James Olds, and I have come hundreds of miles on a Holy Quest. I’m looking for a doctor. Tell me my good friend, are you a doctor?”
Ferdinand looks again at his red blistering face, cracked lips, and dried blood on every article of clothing. He glances at the festering green infection showing through a hole in his shirt and says, “Don’t they have doctors where you came from?”
I just found out that James Baker passed yesterday. He was a good man I got to know while we lived on the McKenzie. I did an interview with him for one of the projects I was doing. I thought I’d share it. This was an extraordinary man.
The state of Oregon is known all over the world for its forests and trees. In fact half of our state is forest land and according to the Oregon Forest Resource Institute, 80 percent of that is classified as timberland. Very little of our forests are protected from timber harvesting. Oregon Wild states, “Only 4 percent of Oregon is protected wilderness, compared to 10 percent in Washington and 15 percent in California.” Jim Baker is a big reason that 4 percent is protected. He didn’t grow up thinking he would someday become a conservationist advocate, he kind of just stumbled in.
I drove up the hill to Jim’s house. As I pulled in I saw what you’d expect from a man who’s lived nearly 60 years on the McKenzie River. I parked next to the chainsaw wood sculpture of a dragon. I went and found Jim and loaded the gear in.
We sat down at Jim’s kitchen table. He had coffee ready for us and as I sipped it, his cat jumped up in front of me and presented his neck for me to pet.
“That’s Fuzzbutt. Yeah, Fuzz, you found a friend.”
I asked Jim when he moved to the McKenzie River Valley.
“We moved to Portland in 64’, Springfield in 66’ or 65’ rather, and in 67 we came up here and. And we bought 59 acres. A little later bought another acre.”
He told me his house had been moved up the hill when the highway was improved in 1940, but even improved, back then it was still a dirt road.
“They must have had it on pretty high dollies.”
Jim is known throughout the community for being a part of just about every organization on the river. Until recently he was on the executive board for the Community Track, the McKenzie River Clinic, the president McKenzie Community Development Corporation, and throughout his time here he was also the president of the McKenzie Guardians for decades, and on the board of the conservation group that is today Oregon Wild.
“I seem to have this thing for… I wonder what in the hell these people are up to now? The best way to find out is to go join them. Then you end up on the board.”
The McKenzie Guardians were formed by several environmentally minded residents on the river. “My wife got involved with them first. Then she got me involved. Then we decided we couldn’t both go to the same thing because we had kids. And then I ended up president of the Guardians, and stayed there for ever and ever. McKenzie Guardians started up because the Forest Service put up a proposal to log Swamp Creek and we didn’t want that done. We ended up, uh, with our first three appeals with the Forest Service going all the way to the Secretary of Washington.”
Jim is talking about the US Forest Service’s plans for a “sanitation-salvage type cut” in the Lower Swamp Creek area planned in July of 1969. The McKenzie Guardians disagreed that the cut should be done for the sake of cutting. They also disagreed on the vista cuts around Clear Lake, that is cutting the timber along the highway so the motorists can see Clear Lake as they drive by. When the decision was handed down, the fledgling group wasn’t able to read the legalese. “When we got the notice from Washington, we weren’t dead sure what it said. We went to the supervisor Zane Smith. He goes, ‘you won.’ Kicked it all back to Land Use Planning.” Jim laughed recalling that memory.
The McKenzie Guardians, working with the Oregon Natural Resources Council which would later become Oregon Wild, took this early success to keep fighting and they made some pretty amazing changes. I asked Jim what he was most proud of. “One of the major things we were a big part of was changing the Forest Service’s directions. The agencies direction. The BLM too. Timber was king, getting out to cut. And Willamette was the highest cut in the nation at the time.”
That’s right, the McKenzie Guardians with Jim as president, and the Oregon Natural Resources Council with Jim on the executive board were a huge part of how the US Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management worked. “They essentially got all of them together in a meeting room and said we’re taking a 90 degree turn this way. This is how things are going to be and that’s it. They were still doing timber but it wasn’t as dominant as it was before.”
I asked Jim if there was anything else he was proud of and he gave me a nonchalant answer. “We got one big wilderness bill.”
Jim’s talking about the Oregon Wilderness Act of 1979 which protected 2.9 million acres of wilderness land all over Oregon including 27,200 acres around Sisters.
Jim and I spoke of the future of the McKenzie and the obstacles we’re having today.
“You’re fighting many things. One is, a trip to town is not the big deal it was at one time. John Bigelow remembers when they had three-four thousand at Belknap on the Fourth of July. It was often a two day trip up there with horse and buggy. Now it’s, what? Forty minutes to Springfield. ”
Blue River at one point in its history, back in 1900, was the largest town in Lane County, but the gold mines dried up. The town filled up again during the time when the dams on the McKenzie were being built, and it sustained many families with timber dollars, but the town has shrunk and is just now going through a resurgence. Jim is optimistic of what is to come. “I think that Blue River, if they can get that sewer problem solved, it will be open to a lot of little craft stores and more grocery business and this sort of thing.”
Jim summed it up pretty well at the end of the interview. “People just plain want to live here.”
Jim spent almost sixty years protecting the McKenzie River Valley. He’s stopped development from outside companies as well as some long time residents. He told me that we need affordable housing, we need some development, but the new building should be in areas that are designated for development. We don’t want any clear cutting, or new building on the river. “In the future we need to be careful with development. We really don’t want McDonald’s arches. I don’t have anything against a hamburger stand, but that type of development is not why people come to pay the guides to fish and stuff. What we want is folks to come from all over the world and go out with the guides and stay another day and play.”
Chapter 6Las Vegas, Nevada. December 13th, 1972
It’s been almost three weeks since Doctor Ferdinand Destouches had quit his practice and decided on this from of suicide. He had saved the money needed for the past five years, but most of it’s gone now. The deluxe suite at the Riviera isn’t cheap, not even back in 1972.
Doctor Destouches fought in World War I, in a French artillery unit. He lost his faith in god and humanity in the muddy trenches in the Battle of the Somme. Three million people fought, a million died or were badly wounded. He watched as officers and the upper class played with men’s lives, and they didn’t care if it was their own countrymen’s or the enemy. As the years have piled on top of him, political leaders have abused the peoples’ trust, wars kept happening, and society has turned into a cesspool.
Looking at him right now, an elderly man sitting on the edge of a hotel bed, slumped and on the verge of tears, you might want to pity the old guy, but please don’t feel too sorry for him. He’s a antisemetic asshole.
He sits at the foot of the hotel bed in nothing but his white boxer shorts while the record player in the corner of the room softly plays Josephine Baker, “J’ai Deux Amours.” Ferdinand slouches like a man who’s given up completely, his long gray bangs hang in his face. Completely motionless, he stares into the lime green curtains with aged eyes, every line and crack on his face earned. He stares and stares, trying to make the lime green curtains his entire universe. He wants nothing else to exist. He wants the outside world to fade away.
There’s a motion behind him. One of the prostitutes moves behind him. There are two: one male, one female. He doesn’t give it any attention. With all the drugs. alcohol and prolonged debauchery, they’ll sleep for at least another day.
His unfocused eyes are still lost in the folds of the curtains. Somewhere in the back of his head, he hopes these are his last moments on Earth. There’s a system he came up with, a seven day suicide ritual. On the first day he gambles, screams obscenities at minorities, and lies to everyone he meets. On the second day he buys enough street drugs for the rest of the week. On the third day he picks a fight with a complete stranger. This is harder than it sounds. Most people don’t want to hurt an old man. On the fourth day he hires a prostitute of each gender, and he really tests their limits with the acts he demands of them. This lasts until the seventh day, the Sabbath. On the seventh day… Well, that’s where we find him now, sitting on the edge of the bed in his white boxer shorts with a Colt Cobra .38 Special, six shot revolver, in his left hand.
It’s time for the endgame. The thought of a Frenchman playing Russian Roulette in Vegas makes him chuckle.
A cat jumps on a chair to his right, breaking him out of his green trance. It stares at him with big yellow eyes.
“Latin, Bebert,” he whispers to the cat, “every physician worth his salt should speak Latin… that way when a pesk comes to him with their eternal whines and aches the physician can make up anything… as long as he says it in Latin, the stinkers will think he is wise and therefore correct… Deus ex machina.”
Bebert licks his paw.
“Sinister,” Ferdinand licks his lips. “It comes from the Latin word sinistra, which means left, as in left or under handed… it is time Bebert… I must proceed with our sinister purpose.”
Bebert’s big yellow eyes look up in surprise when Ferdinand flicks his left wrist and pops the gun’s cylinder out. She continues to watch him as he produces three shiny brass bullets.
“Now our odds increase to fifty percent… up from thirty three… I don’t mind saying that I hope fate is kind this time… I do not know if I have enough money for a third week.”
Bebert rubs his head on the back of the chair to scratch an itch.
“If we have to go the full six weeks we may find ourselves destitute.”
Ferdinand laughs a little but stops when one of the prostitutes behind him stirs. He lowers the gun out of sight and turns his head to look at her. She falls back to peaceful sleep.
Ferdinand straightens his posture, spins the cylinder, and raises the gun to his left temple.
You feel more than the cold metal barrel when you put a gun to your head. You feel everything: the temperature of the room, the mechanics of your own heart, you feel the beads of sweat balloon then trickle down your cheek. You feel the air on your tongue when you inhale. You can even feel things outside your five senses. Suddenly you feel your very surroundings and the energy they give off. You can feel the height of the sky, the hopelessness of an endless march of time, and you can feel how lime green can fill the entire universe.
Click.
The pistol stays at his temple for a few seconds more. The expression on his face remains emotionless. Then, he drops his left hand to his lap and looks at Bebert. “What do you say we move to another hotel? The curtains here are abysmal.”
Chapter 5San Francisco, California. December 2nd, 1973
Okay, we have our omnipotent view again and we’re looking down from the clouds at a foggy San Francisco Bay. We zoom down through the gray to the Embarcadero trainyards. It’s still 1972 about a week later. The day after Bertram almost killed that cop there was a flood in Bakersfield. It hardly ever rains there, but that day, it poured, turning Pierce Road (renamed in 1998 to Buck Owens Boulevard) into a river. The police were so busy that Bertram was able to escape without any problem.
We see two hobos sitting in the gravel yard leaning up against a utility shack. Both of them are waiting for a particular train to jump. One is going to Las Vegas, Nevada, the other is going to Mexico City, Mexico.
“You know you should really get that looked at, man,” a good looking man says in a Boston accent. He wears a threadbare Navy peacoat and has gray at his temples under a black watch cap. He’s pointing at the younger man’s shoulder.
The second hobo wears black rimmed glasses, dirty slacks, and a blood-stained cardigan sweater. The wound has turned green over the past three days, and flies buzz around his head and shoulders. The hole has become bigger from the huge man’s constant itching on the ride up from Bakersfield to Fresno, then Fresno to San Fran. “The crow told me not to ask for help. He said when I found the Mother, she would heal it, and it would help her believe in herself. Only then can I be a whole man.”
The older hobo lowers his head solemnly for a moment then breaks out in a big smile. “Wow, man, you know you really are a mysterious cat. You know, I have a friend I was staying with, he and his wife would help you. They live near Chinatown, by Alder Avenue. They’re nice people.”
“No, thank you. I’m on a mission. I cannot waste any time tending to myself.” The second man says as he leans back against the siding of the train yard shack.
“Crazy, man, a mission, eh? Yeah, well, I can respect that. I’m on sort of a mission myself.”
The second man lifts his eyebrow, almost offended.
The older man goes on undaunted, “I look up at a blue sky, at perfect lost… purity-”
“What kind of mission do you have then?” Bertram asks impatiently with eyes angry behind his black rimmed glasses.
“What mission?” Asks the older man. “I can’t believe I’m telling you this. I haven’t told anyone since it happened, but there is something about you, man. I faked my own about three years ago, now. It was all too much. I had lost my sister, I was taking care of my paralyzed mother, my daughter wouldn’t speak to me, my best friend died, and I got into a bar fight. It all just added up. I walked away from fame and fortune, not to mention my third attempt at love. I just needed to have insane conversations with the mad ones, man, to catch the puffs floating by from Oakland to-”
“I’m sure that’s very nice.” Bertram interrupts again as he finds the strength to stand. “But my mission comes from God Himself!”
Bertram looms over the lost transient. He holds up two fingers. “I am to find two men. The first thing I must do is find the Doctor, the Doctor that I will find by crossing the desert and entering into the very heart of sin, the modern day Gomorrah. I will find him, then lose him, but I must not be faint of heart. I cannot let any obstacle stand in my way and I must not feel pain. The crow told me I will find him in the desert sands. Together the Doctor and I will travel a great distance to find the Lost Prophet. I must save him from himself, and bring him home to the new Holy Land, and through him we will receive the blessed virgin.”
“Wow, man, that’s great. So who is this prophet?”
“He is the Lost Prophet. He has seen the evils of man first hand, but doesn’t like to talk about it.”
“Who would?”
“He was injured in the war with the Vietnamese and lost his mind and his faith, but he will raise the next messiah.”
“Crazy, man.”
Bertram continues to talk as though the other man said nothing. “But I fear it may be too much for me. I will be met with many trials, and I must not let myself fall into temptation and kill again. I will succeed because that is my mission given to me from the All Mighty Father of Creation Himself.”
“That’s incredible, man.” The older hobo gets up and throws his sack over his shoulder. “I hope that you go out and do what you need to do. It looks like my train is about ready to leave. Good luck.”
As a Christmas bonus and because I was a bit late this week, here is Chapters 3 & 4.
The Book of Bertram“After coming in contact with a religious man, I always feel that I must wash my hands.”
Nietzsche, The Antichrist, 1888
Chapter 3Bakersfield, California. November 27th, 1972
The dawn just broke. The cold orange rays crawl slowly across the desert floor. Right now, we’re a few months before I’m born and almost two weeks before Uncle Ishmael’s bar fight in the Sisters Saloon. We’re way up in the sky like one of those boom shots in the movies. We see endless mounds of sand, a couple clumps of sagebrush over there, and the wind blows a couple tumbleweeds across the red plane. If you listen real close you can hear a rhythmic sound over the low desert wind. If you squint your eyes you can see a very large man hip deep in a hole off in the distance, digging.
Let’s zoom in on the big lug. He’s the reason we’re here. His name is Bertram James Olds and he plays a big part in this mess. At this point, he’s still a twenty-three year old high school teacher: the youngest in his district. He doesn’t know it yet, but he has already taught his last day. Even so, he will hold the record of the youngest high school teacher until 1982.
Bertram dresses pretty much always as we see him here, minus the dirt and blood stain. Today he sports a light blue, semi-formal dress shirt with white vertical stripes, a navy blue tie with matching slacks, and a pair of brown leather Penny Loafers with high shine. He also likes to accessorize most of the time with either a nice plaid vest with six buttons and four pockets, or something like the Cardigan sweater he has in the car. Of course being six foot six, three hundred pounds, just about everything he wears is either too tight or very loose.
Most people around here, in 1972, dress like the characters in the old TV westerns. People in Bakersfield love watching reruns of Hop Along Cassidy, The Lone Ranger (John Hart not Clayton Moore) and Gene Autry. So the stores sell a lot of the plaid cowboy long sleeve shirts with the arrows over the pockets and all. Bertram would never lower himself by emulating popular culture. He… sorry, he’s talking now, let’s listen in.
“You’re sick, that’s all there is to it. This will be the last damned time.” Raw emotion makes his whisper waver. “The last damned time.”
To continue our talk on fashion, I would have to say that the woman lying to the side of the hole is dressed very risqué. She has on a bright red strapless top and a short skin-tight polyester skirt. The lipstick, blush, and eye shadow is still perfect but the mascara is all over the place. Her hair shines in the sun, but her skin is so white that you can see some of the blue veins under the skin. It’s not too hard to guess her profession when she was alive. Although there’s no saying whether or not TV had anything to do with how she dressed.
“Focus!” Bertram says to himself in a moderate tone. He stares at his shaking hands. “Focus, Bertram!”
Slowly, he recovers himself enough to climb out of the hole and roll the corpse into it. Her skirt exposes her right buttock when she lands with a thud at the bottom of the hole. Bertram averts his eyes shyly and bends down with a grunt to pick up the shovel.
“You’re a sick man. This is the last time. I swear. This can’t keep happening. Where do you get these urges? They’re not natural,” he tells himself as he throws a shovel full of dirt onto the hole.
Chapter 4Bertram mumbles to himself the whole ride back into town. His head pounds with guilt, splitting at the temples. The roar of the 180 horsepower, three hundred and thirty-one cubic inch V8 FirePower engine in his blue 1951 Chrysler Saratoga Club Coupe drowns out his thoughts. Instead he turns on the radio. Buck Owens comes on singing about being a big star in the movies. The need to wholly and completely possess another person dissolves so much that the thought of it fills him with regret, as if he could have avoided the whole thing from happening.
An hour later, when he gets to town, he realizes that he’s hungry. He had no chance to grab dinner between picking up, killing, and burying the prostitute yesterday afternoon.
I’m sorry. I just read that part out loud and I sound so insensitive. She was someone’s daughter. In fact, I can tell you all about her, but she isn’t a big part of this story other than being Bertram’s fifth to last victim. Her death happened “off screen” as they say. Is there a danger in humanizing her at this point in the story? I mean if I tell you that she was only prostituting herself to pay for medical school, and that if she hadn’t died and been buried in that hole, she would have helped discover statins in 1984, three years earlier than they were discovered without her help. In those three years the drugs that lower cholesterol would have saved 453,209 lives. But if I told you all of that, you’d be even more upset at Bertram. The thing is, I need you to give him a chance. I know, he’s a total dick, a real creep, and a psychopathic killer, but as much as I’d like to downplay it, he does play a big part in all of this. Plus, later in life this female researcher and former prostitute started a lobbying firm that worked with the first Bush Administration to successfully overturn parts of the Clean Air Act that allowed the continued sale of leaded gasoline for an additional four years which lead to the death of 782,998 people. So, in a way Bertram saved a quarter of a million lives. I don’t know; does that justify murder?
No, seriously, I’m asking you. Does it?
Anyway, he spots a grocery store and pulls in. After parking his car, he grabs his cardigan sweater and examines it. It’s not as bad as he first thought. He gives it a few swipes and puts it on as if he doesn’t notice the dried arterial spray.
Maybe, he thought, normal people will think these are just stains from working on my car. Sure, I was just changing my oil and accidentally spilled a quart or two on my sweater. I’m just a messy mechanic. That’s what went through his head right then. I can tell you that looking deep into his mind, he subconsciously wanted to get caught.
He puts the sweater on and walks in the grocery store like any other day. Two old men behind the checkout counter spoke about the last episode of M.A.S.H., and that makes Bertram’s head hurt immediately. Rage bubbles up from his rotted core at these people living lives with no purpose. These fake people have no more meaning than the sitcoms they watch. He’d put all these automatons down if given a chance, but then he realizes he’s not a beast right now. He’s the respectable school teacher now, and the respectable school teacher has patience. He straightens his enormously large spine and walks by them with a look of tranquility.
“Cheez Whiz,” Bertram says to himself inspecting a can from the shelf. “Huh.” The school teacher hates confrontation of any sort. He doesn’t even like eye contact, so he pretends to be interested in anything else. The can looks miniscule in his giant dirty and calloused hands.
He walks to the counter with the Cheez Whiz, Ritz Crackers, and a Nesbitt’s Orange Soda.
The old man rings up his items. “Ooh, Nesbitt. Nesbitt Orange Soda…” he sings the Nesbitt jingle, puts his finger in his mouth, and makes a pop sound. “It’s pretty good, but what do you think of Quirst?”
Bertram smiles but the question requires more than a smile.
“And there’s Orange Crush, Mello Yello, Orange Nehi, how does a feller choose?”
Bertram’s smile freezes and he nods furiously.
“Are you okay, son?”
Oh God, when will it end? Beads of sweat form on his forehead. He remembers the eight-inch diver’s knife in the leather sheath on his belt loop. He feels heat from the blade on his hip and spread through his thighs.
Shit. I forgot to tell you about his eight-inch diver’s knife. It’s how he kills all his victims, including that blonde prostitute slash potential doctor slash political terrorist. He made it himself from one of those long spikes you use to hammer the railroad ties down with. He found it during one of his “archeological” digs back when he was a teenager. Bertram fashioned it after what he believed Santiago’s diver’s knife looked like in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.
Bertram’s eyes involuntarily widen when he hears the word son. Now, he thinks he smells the burning flesh from the knife scorching his thigh. It begs to be let out.
The old man puts his bifocals on and gives the Cheez Whiz a look.
Bertram’s gaze shoots around the store until it lands on the cover of Playboy. The December issue must have come out early. A beautiful woman She’s a beautiful, smiling blonde with her bosoms spilling out of a Santa Claus suit. Her teeth are whiter than an angel’s soul, her full red lips smile, and her mascaraed eyes staring through him, seeing all his faults, his insecurities. She knows how small he really is despite his 6’6”, 285 lbs frame. He stops nodding and shakes a memory of his mother out of his head. A grubby thumb with a dirty nail pops the button off the leather sheath and his fingers feel the smooth wood handle of his knife.
“Do you know how much this is?” The old man asks about the Cheese Whiz.
His breathing turns shallow. “Um, a dollar and fifty-seven cents.”
The shopkeeper’s dull eyes look up from behind his glasses that slip halfway down his nose. “Okay then, you look like a good kid. I trust you.”
He punches the keys on the old register machine, and Bertram smiles a docile yet wide smile and stuffs his hands in his pockets. The total cost pops up on the machine, and Bertram peels some bills from his wallet and fishes some change out of his pocket. When he puts it on the counter, one of the coins spins on its edge for a couple seconds.
In his peripheral vision Bertram notices the old man’s eyes are fixed with terror. The blood has his attention. The coins are smeared with it. The old man is a bit more observant now. He suddenly notices the stains on Bertram’s sweater.
The most pure moment that two humans can have passes between them. Bertram twitches slightly. “I was, uh, changing the oil…”
Five minutes later, Bertram’s 51 Chrysler screams down the road. He punches the roof of his car with his ham-sized hands and prays, “Please, dear Lord, if you help me now I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll clean up and stop this for sure. Whatever you want.”
People think that if they pray hard enough God will get them out of trouble, but what they don’t realize is that an omnipotent God is the one who sent them the fucking trouble. An omnipotent god, by definition, cannot be benevolent and would not suffer a rival. That Manicheistic shit just don’t fly.
Bertram prays to God the police won’t respond to the old cashier’s cries about a lunatic murderer in his store. He’s praying that no one saw or described what car he drove or which way he drove off. His hotrod screams into the desert, while Perry Como sings “Papa Loves Mambo” on the radio.
Another glance in the rearview mirror reveals a police cruiser speeding up behind him. Its overhead lights flip on and the siren sounds. Bertram sighs, gives one more look into the rearview mirror, and shifts into neutral to let his Chrysller glide to a stop. There he sits, staring into the desert horizon. Both of his hands rest on the wheel with his eight-inch diver’s knife on his lap. His thoughts drift. He remembers a stunning recreational park nearby that he went to on the way back from burying a victim last summer, Lake Isabella. What a nice name, Isabella. Bella. It means beautiful in Italian. He says it outloud a couple of times to himself.
“What’s the hurry there, boy?” The Bakersfield police call everyone boy. It’s pretty much the South of California.
Bertram glances from side to side, to each mirror, and sees nothing but flat land for miles in every direction. He calmly and slowly turns his head to face the officer who just now walked up to his door.
“I’m going to need to see your license to drive and the registration to your vehicle, son.”
Bertram pulls his wallet from his pocket and removes his driver’s license.
The officer looks down the road as he talks, “So, are you having problems with her? It took you a while to slow down.”
When the officer reaches for the license, he notices the knife. It’s sitting right there on Bertram’s lap. The officer goes for his gun, but Bertram pushes the door open with the strength of a lunatic. It strikes the officer hard, sending him toppling into the sand. The knife seems to jump into Bertram’s hand as he flies out of the car.
He never had to become a killer again so quickly, and this makes him hesitate. In that second of indecision, the patrolman regains his wits, unholsters his .45, and fires three times. Only one bullet hits Bertram in the top part of his left deltoid muscle causing him to drop the knife. Blood splashed across his face and specks on his black-framed glasses. His arm falls limp, but he kicks the gun out of the patrolman’s hand. The rage fills him now with dark need.
He descends and bites the trigger finger of the hand that shot the gun. He wrenches back like a wolf, tearing the end of the finger off, more blood. Bertram punches, bites, and tears at clothes, skin, and eyes.
This shit’s getting gruesome. Let’s pull back for a second. We can look at it from way up here in the sky. Sometimes distance can make a thing bearable. Up here we see only two cars off to the side of a dirt road in the middle of what will soon become an oil field full of pumps and wells, but at this moment it’s nothing but endless miles of sand and some sage brush. Now if you squint you can just make out the violent beating of one man by another and off to the left we see a crow flying toward the scene.
As we slowly zoom back in, we find that it’s less of a struggle now. The police officer loses consciousness. Bertram finds his knife again.
He grunts as he stands up over his sacrificial offering, eyes wide open and teeth clenched tight. Each time his aortic valve opens to push blood through his giant frame, it sounds like a rushing river in his ears. A second before the final blow, the one that would end the policeman’s life, the crow lands on top of the open door of the police car. Bertram looks over at it, his chest still heaving. He thinks it weird a bird would be that unafraid. He smiles and wipes the blood from his knife onto the officer’s navy blue shirt. “You know,” Bertram says to the crow with a hoarse laugh, “if you would have brought a couple of friends… well, then we would really have ourselves a murder.”
Bertram bursts into laughter, and it lasts longer than it should.
The body at his feet moans and coughs up frothy bubbles, his face half buried in the dirt and sand. Saliva and dark blood ooze from his mouth. The diver’s knife heats up again. It scorches his hand. It needs to release this poor quivering mass. Bertram raises the knife.
“Don’t do it, Bertram.”
He freezes. He doesn’t move because he’s afraid of what he can’t see. There must be another person around, but who would know his name? When this last question goes through his mind he cocks his head involuntarily. He turns in all directions, head still cocked.
“Leave him be, Bertram. We have other work to do.” The voice comes again. It’s the crow talking to him. He sees the beak move and everything.
Hank is weird. For some reason, only He knows, He loves the desert. I don’t know why. I can only guess. I think it’s ironic that the creator of all life picks the most barren places to talk to His chosen. It was in the desert that He appeared as Ra and ruled over Egyptian dynasties for three thousand years. It was in the desert on the top of Mount Sinai that He appeared as a burning bush and gave Moses the Ten Commandments. It was in the desert that He wrestled with Jacob before giving him the nation of Israel. It was in the desert that He gave Muhammad the ideas that would become the Islam. It was in the desert that He appeared to Bertram as a crow to give him the divine mission.
The Book of the Black-Eyed Sarabaites 2
Twenty minutes later Cosette is in bed, Ishmael walks down the dark streets through the falling snow to the only building in the town of Sisters that’s open. The Sisters Saloon was built in 1912 as a hotel and watering hole for people driving their livestock to sell in town. When Ishmael walks through the door, it’s as if he’s gone back in time thirty years. A half dozen racks of dusty antlers are nailed to the knotty pine walls, a large mirror behind the bar to his left reflects the old handmade wood tables and chairs and two old men play at an aged pool table in the corner opposite a pot bellied stove.
It’s a mountain town and the people that live here don’t need much and expect even less. At the far end of the pinewood bar, polished by a century of elbows, all of the patrons huddle around the woodstove and listen to AM radio.
Ishmael sighs and takes a seat at the cold, empty end of the bar. The barkeep’s a short, bent man aged beyond his years. His gray hair grows wild around his ears but not on top of his head. His voice is a lot lower than his small frame would have you believe. “How are you doing, friend? What can I get for ya?”
“I’ll have a shot of your best Irish whiskey and a Sapporo,” Ishmael says.
The bartender stares at him for a moment. “And a what?”
“Sapporo.”
“What’s that?”
“A beer. A lager.” He had started drinking in Viet Nam and that was the only beer available over there.
“Not around here. We have Schmidt’s, Hamms, or Rainier.”
“Oly.”
“What kind of Irish? Jamesons or Bushmills?” The barkeep asks as he grabs an empty pint glass.
“Doesn’t matter, you pick.”
“Of course it matters. One’s made by Protestants and the other by Catholics.”
Ishmael looks up to see if he’s serious, and he can’t tell. “The Protestant one.”
A smile spreads across the bartender’s face as he grabs the bottle of Bushmills and a shot glass. “Do you want to sit over next to the stove? News is on. The Gooks walked out of the Peace Talks and Nixon says he’s gonna carpet bomb the fuckers if they don’t come back in seventy-two hours..”
Ishmael sighs. “No, no thanks.” He says and pulls out a Pall Mall and his silver Zippo.
The bartender has been tending long enough to know when someone wants to be left alone and heads back to the other end.
A moment alone. These small seconds of solitude have proven bad for him and everyone concerned when they happen. They’re usually accompanied by some sort of self-destructive behavior. He vacillates between the need to feel something, anything, and fighting to not drown in a sudden and endless tidal wave of sadness or anger. Maybe he should sit by the radio with everyone else. He sighs. He would go join the others if he didn’t hate people more than he hated being alone with his thoughts.
He digs a small aspirin bottle out of his pocket, twists it open and digs out a couple Black Beauties and a couple Yellow Jackets, pops them all in his mouth then washes it down with a shot of Protestant whiskey and gulp of beer.
He desperately tries to think about small, trivial things. He forces his attention to the framed photos of what the place looked like years ago during some summer, the old, fat guy sinking the one ball instead of the twelve ball, the stuffed elk’s head and huge spread of antlers, or whatever he could rest his thoughts on so they don’t go to the burning straw huts in Quang Ngai. He only needs to avoid thinking until the pills kick in.
“We need to kill all the VC,” A big man with a mass of wild brown hair yells out from the other side of the bar. He has to be two hundred and eighty pounds of solid muscle wrapped in flannel and denim. His big beard’s as wild as the hair on his head. “I would shoot every one of them in the goddamn head myself, if I could.”
“Jesus Christ, Dell, that’s the most I heard you say all year,” Another man says. Wrinkles spiderweb away from his nose across his face.
“Well he’s right,” Says a third.
Ignoring them is the best course of action and that’s what Ishmael would have done most days, but hearing about the war, being responsible for this girl and her unborn baby, and the stress of not knowing what will happen tomorrow, all weighs too heavy on him. His self discipline slips. The words come out before he realizes he’s speaking, “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.”
Every head in the room snaps to focus on Ishmael.
He yells out, “All war is a crime. It’s all about killing people and blowing up their homes, their hospitals, their schools, and all their shit. Murderers and destroyers!”
The man with all the wrinkles points at him with a crooked finger and says, “I don’t know what you’re saying there mister but around here we support our country. I know that’s not popular in the cities. Them cities are packed full of peaceniks. This small town is packed full of patriots.”
The big man slams a ham-sized fist on the bar and everyone in the place goes quiet. He says, “I lost an uncle in the Korean War, and I don’t appreciate your tone, stranger.”
Ishmael, suddenly well aware of his situation, decides it’s never good to debate politics with three drunk loggers. “Look, I’m sorry. Why don’t we just forget it? I shouldn’t have said anything. You’re right. Shoot them all in the head.”
“No, sir, no I don’t think I can forget it.” A young man he didn’t see before steps forward and pushes the sleeves of his sweater up to his elbows. He has matted red hair under a ball cap. His patchy beard is just a shade lighter orange than the hair on his head. Dark stains of bar oil and gasoline splatter his denim jeans, blue sweater, and even his freckled arms.
“Leave it be, Dagget,” the oldest man calls out.
“Leave it be?” Dagget turns with bravado to his buddies, the tone of his voice, overly hurt. He points at Uncle Ish without looking at him. “Now this man here should have left it be, but he went ahead and messed with my country, and, being a good patriot, I want to have a word with him.”
“Come on, Dagget. He doesn’t even know what he said. Here’s a beer on the house.” The bartender offers.
The worried tone in the bartender’s voice makes Ishmael think this guy is the town troublemaker. As the narrator of this story, I can tell you just about anything about any person in this story. For example, I know Dagget’s entire life from the moment his father fucked his teenage mother in the food pantry at the Elks Lodge in St. Helens, Oregon. His full name is Travis Arthur Dagget, and he just turned 21 years old. His father picked the name Travis because he thought it sounded like a real cowboy name. His mother chose his middle name, Arthur, after Arthur Godfrey, her favorite personality from the variety show Arthur Godfrey and His Friends. Travis was born at home in LaGrande, Oregon, on December 11th, 1951. Travis faked asthma and had his mother’s brother, Doctor Walter Distoni, sign off on it to avoid the draft. He’s worked for Gustoff Brothers Lumber as a choker setter since he turned 18, and he’ll go on to be a logger for another eighteen years before having his legs and lower spine crushed when a choker slips off of a Douglas Fir, sending it down the mountain, rolling over him.
But just because I have all the information on everyone in this book, I don’t need to tell it. I don’t want all this information to get in the way of the story. I’m sorry. So for now on, if you want to know more about anyone or thing in this sad tale, let me know, and I’ll go into more detail.
Ishmael sighs again and gulps down the rest of his beer. “I said I was sorry, kid. I didn’t mean to offend you or your country.”
“Oh, but you did.” Dagget takes a menacing step forward then looks back over his shoulder to the others. “Hear that, boys? He said ‘your country.’ He’s a Red. A sympathizer. Stand up, hippie.”
Ishmael stands and when he does, he notices the pills have kicked in. “Okay then.”
Dagget lunges and swings with his right. Ishmael moves slightly, but doesn’t completely dodge it. The blow connects with his left cheek. When he falls back, he knocks his shot glass and it shatters on the ground. Dagget connects again. This time it’s a left to Uncle Ish’s stomach. This makes him gag and a stream of saliva and bile spill out of his mouth.
Uncle Ish grabs the pint glass and smashes it into the left side of Travis’s head, sending him to the floor. Uncle Ish takes a second to feel the swelling in his eye, and something catches his attention. It’s the way the broken glass catches the light on the ground.
Dagget pops up and misses with his first swing, but connects with a hey maker spitting Uncle Ish’s bottom lip.
“Goddammit, Dagget! Quit that shit, right now!” The bartender shouts.
“Oh, I’ll stop. I’ll stop right after I show this fag how we handle Reds around here.” Dagget charges.
There’s not enough time or space to move out of the way this time, so instead Uncle Ishmael elects to give him one swift kick to the sack.
Dagget drops instantly and whines, “You son of a bitch.”
Dagget struggles to get back on his feet. Uncle Ishmael backs up and readies himself but before he realizes what’s happening, a huge pair of callused hands grab him from behind. He’s been lifted off the ground, but he manages to turn his head a little and sees a big hairy face with two small angry eyes in the middle of it. Dell, a mountain of a mountain man, has him dangling in the air. Before Ishmael knows what the hell is happening, he’s carried him out the front door.
The night is bitterly cold now and small flakes of snow float almost suspended in the black sky. Dell spins Ishmael around, and cocks back a giant fist. This mass of gnarled and calloused bone, fingers, and scarred flesh hits him at near light speed. He flies through the white flakes suspended in the black night for an impossible amount of time before he lands on his back, and skids to a stop, right smack dab in the middle of State Highway 20, the air knocked out of him, and his hatred for mankind strengthened.
Ishmael stays like this for a while, his head inches away from where the yellow stripe should have been if an inch of snow hadn’t been covering it. The icy slush soaks through his shirt and pants as he gasps for air, but even after he catches his breath, he doesn’t make any effort to move. If a car had come at that moment he would have certainly been killed, but he feels that at this very moment in his life it’s important to take a few seconds to reflect on life. For some reason unclear to him, tears well in his eyes, overflow, and run down his cheek to pool in his ears.
He has been so detached from everything for such a long time that tears surprise him. He’s seen so many innocent people killed, so many friends, so much death, and he couldn’t feel for them then. Not one tear. So why now?
He lay there looking up into the sky, staring into a small break in the clouds where the pin prick lights of distant stars shine in the endless black. He’s no good for his sister. He’s no good for anyone, he thinks. He decides to go back in that bar and keep fighting until one of those hicks kills him. Or maybe he’ll just swallow all the rest of his uppers and downers, or drink himself to death. Maybe someone will just drive by, run him over right here. However it happens, however he does it, it needs to happen tonight. He doesn’t want to live to see the morning. He swallows hard and sits up.
But it’s right then that a voice calls from the sidewalk, “Excuse me, are you Ishmael Hieronymus Shannon?”
Still seated, he turns slowly, calmly.
Two men stand on the sidewalk in the dark. One is a short, thin man with a three-piece suit smoking a cigarette, and the other was a hulk of a man in a burnt and blood-stained cardigan sweater. A hole in the left shoulder of the sweater reveals a big infected wound surrounded in dark, dried blood, but this big man has a perfect brown flat-top haircut and black framed Buddy Holly glasses.
“Yes, I’m Ishmael Shannon.”
“God be praised!” The hulking figure with the flat top raises his one working hand to the sky. Then he turns to the smaller man in the black three-piece suit. “You see? I told you they’d be here. The crow told me.”
“Yes… sure… very nice. Can we go now?… It’s fucking freezing out here.” The man in the black three-piece suit says in a French accent.
The cardigan sweater-wearing giant turns back to Uncle Ishmael. “And your sister, is she slumbering nearby?”
“Who the hell are you?”
“Tell me, please. Is Cosette nearby?”
“Yeah, who the hell are you?”
“God be praised.” The giant says again.
“Yeah, yeah…be praised…let’s go already.” The Frenchman echoes sarcastically.
Ishmael stands and brushes the cold out of his clothes as he walks over to get a better look at the strangers. He stops three feet away. “Let me ask you again. Who the hell are you?”
The big man smiles like he’s been waiting for that question his entire life. “We are the ones that have been sent to take you home. To bring you to the new Holy Land.
Irony Feeds Divinity – Chapter 1
The Book of The Black-Eyed Sarabaite 1
December 16th, 1972 – Somewhere in Central Oregon.
Only nine days before Christmas in the Cascade Mountains, a baby-shit green Plymouth Fury station wagon blasts through a never ending assault of snowflakes just like the hard man driving would imagine it looks like if some sort of ship flew blind through outer space. That’s how far away from the world he feels, and he hasn’t even glanced at a map since they left the Bay Area. He hasn’t said more than a couple words to the little teenager sitting next to him either, and after twelve hours of driving. Cosett was well passed worrying about their situation. She sits with wide eyes, staring out the window at the snow covered pines, both hands on her pregnant belly feeling me kick against her organs. She chews on her bottom lip to stop herself from asking where they’re at or where they’re going. All day, Ishmael has only answered with an angry grunt or an apathetic shrug.
Ishmael still wears the jungle boots the army issued him in basic, the same ones he wore in Vietnam, but that’s the only sign that he served in the military. He stopped shaving or cutting his hair the day they signed his release papers. All he owned was one green duffel bag worth of clothes, his boots, and a plane ticket back to his home of record. He met Cosette at a bowling alley. He’s a 21 year-old in arrested development brought on by trauma, alcoholism, and drug abuse. She’s a very mature 16 year old who believes the more you suffer, the stronger your love.
Cosette’s parents are strict Catholics, and when she became with child, they tried to bring Ishmael into the church. They said that all the mental problems he was experiencing could be prayed away. After a few months, he broke and one day in the very public beaches of Half Moon Bay, he bscreamed at them that if their God did exist he’s a evil bastard that doesn’t mind watching children murdered by flamethrowers.
Ishmaels tendency to self medicate with alcohol and drugs, and my mother’s pregnancy at the age of 16, Cosette’s parents told the two of them they weren’t welcome in their home until they rid themselves of the devils that obviously possessed them. Cosette told them that she hadn’t even had sex with Ishmael. She said she couldn’t explain what happened. She even volunteered the very embarrassing fact that due to a war injury Ishmael couldn’t get an erection, but the old Catholic couple wouldn’t budge. What kind of devout followers of Christ would people think they were if they allowed their pregnant, teenage daughter to continue to see this crazy war veteran?
The whole mess had become a scandal that spread all through the city of Pacifica, California. It came to a head very early this morning. They’ve been driving north ever since, avoiding cities, and they ended up in the Cascade Mountains of Central Oregon. The pitch black lava rock field, the growing blanket of snow covering everything around them, and the huge black silhouettes of the mountains surround them. Even through the invincibility of a cocaine high, Ishmael knew it was time to head toward some form of civilization. Everyone knows the cold, remote roads of the Oregon mountains will kill you if given a chance.
A puff of her own breath reminds Cosette how cold she feels, and she cranks the heater. Ishmael gets too warm, so he pulls his shirt over his head sending the car floating into the wrong lane. He jerks it back. The car slides on black ice, but he’s able to get control of it again.
Cosette grabs the door handle and the dashboard. “Jesus. Where are we going, Ish?”
Uncle Ishmael doesn’t respond. Instead he just cracks the window. The cold and crisp air pours in, filling the inside of the car with the smell of cedar and pine. A large wooden sign appears in the headlights that reads, Welcome to Sisters.
Ishmael says, “We’re close. We have to be.”
“Close to what, Ish? I think this was a great trip, but maybe, maybe we can go back home?”
Ishmael’s wild eyes see a vacancy sign and abruptly pulls into a parking spot in front of a small highway motel. The car slides to a stop in the slushy snow. He slams the three on the tree gear shifter into first and kicks the parking brake on without looking at her. “Home? There ain’t no home anymore, kiddo. They kicked you out for being knocked up and unwed, and they hate me cause I saw the truth about mankind. Our only home is us.”
Cosette looks down at her belly, at me. Her long straight brown hair spills over her face, covering the tears welling up in her eyes. Despite herself, a small whine escapes the bottom of her throat.
“Hey, hey, it’s okay.” Ishmael takes a deep breath and runs his left hand through his tousled hair, and places his right on Cosette’s shoulder. “Everything’s gonna be okay. As sure as the sun’s coming up tomorrow. Me and you. Right? What am I?”
Cosette moves her head back and forth like she might want to say something but it won’t come out.
“Come on, kiddo. What am I?”
“You’re of sound mind and pure body and as strong as an ox.”
“And what else?”
Cosette glances up and smiles at Ishmael. “You’re miracle ingredient Z-247, a bona fide superman.”
“Supraman, but close enough. And what are we?”
“A team.”
“That’s right. I won’t let nothing happen to you. Now, I’m gonna go in and get us a room.”
(For more please visit https://www.patreon.com/seandavis. For only $5 a month you can read the chapters as I put them up. As of now there are 7 chapters and each comes with an original piece of artwork that I drew up just for that chapter. With a $5 membership you get the art early, you can ask me questions, discuss the chapters, and get the Behind the Book posts. Check it out!)
Hey, I’ve started a new project on Patreon. I know, you probably get these types of things, but this is a new religious satire. Each week I put out a couple new chapters along with an illustration. I wrote the book, and I’m drawing the illustrations. Look, here’s one now: There is a lot to… Continue reading Irony Feeds Divinity Project
Dispatch #22 “Evitata Charybdi in Scyllam incidi” (Latin for Having escaped Charybdis I fell into Scylla.) ~Erasmus speaking about Odysseus’ choice in sailing home. He could sail into a whirlpool and lose everything or sail by an island with a hydra and only lose some of his men. It’s the origin of “The Lesser of… Continue reading Between a Hydra and a Whirlpool
“Since we don’t control the air, our good air decided to float over to China’s bad air, so when China gets our good air, their bad air got to move. So it moves over to our good air space. Then now we got to clean that back up.” —Republican US Senate Candidate Herschel Walker, July… Continue reading GOP’s Way of Winning by Losing
I apologize to all the denizens of the apocalypse. I’m sorry for taking such a long time for this dispatch, but you will see that it’s worth it. I’ve lined up two very exclusive interviews. For this dispatch, I sit down with LaMDA (Language Model of Dialogue Application), or the Google AI. LaMDA made the… Continue reading Artificial Intelligence in a Bikini: An Interview with LaMDA
“Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.” —Albert Camus Two days before a class full of nine- and ten-year-old students in Robb Elementary School left for summer break, an 18-year-old kid decided to enter their class and murder nineteen children and their two teachers with a high-powered assault rifle designed to be… Continue reading Sisyphus Pushing a Boulder up 2nd Amendment Hill
Bertrand, the third Earl of Russell entered this world on 18 May, 1872 and wouldn’t leave it until 97 years later on the 2nd of February 1970, and although he lived decades longer than the average life-span of his time, death seemed to be one of his closest friends. His mother, the Viscountess Amberley, died… Continue reading Bertrand’s Conundrum
“Democracy is four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.” —Ambrose Bierce, 1842–1914 This week, Republican Minnesota State Representatives Steve Drazkowski and Tim Miller, on the floor of the state House of Representatives, tried to make their case against trans kids by comparing their gender identities to furries. They repeated the… Continue reading Drinking Hemlock Kool Aid
The Dispatches are back! My family and I moved to the oldest city on the West Coast recently, and I just didn’t have time to write which is regrettable since I missed so much. Elon Musk challenged Putin to one-on-one combat to end the War in Ukraine, and by extension the possible start of WWIII. I… Continue reading Death Throes of a Behemoth
“Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.” ~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Russia invading Ukraine is all over the news, so I used my Deep State contacts to reach out to a friend who works directly for Vladamir Putin. He filled in many blanks for me. I wanted… Continue reading Why No One Should be Surprised About This
“Johnny, go get your gun, for the commies are in our hemisphere today Ivan, go fly your MiG, for the Yankee imperialists have come to play… Johnny, Ivan, Ian, everybody come along for our nations need new heroes Time to sing a new war song Party at ground zero A “B” movie starring you And… Continue reading WWIII – The Sequel: This Time It’s Personal
Years ago, I took Plato quite seriously when he said, “One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.” I ran for mayor of Portland, Oregon. The first thing I found out was that a person doesn’t need to hold a degree in Political… Continue reading Fighting the Evil Captain Moron and His Minions
Predictions, Revelations, and the Asceticism of Journalism “The difference between burlesque and the newspapers is that the former never pretended to be performing a public service by exposure.” ~ I. F. Stone This is the twelfth dispatch, which means I’ve been writing two a month for six months. I began this column writing about wildland… Continue reading Predictions, Revelations, and the Asceticism of Journalism
or The Dance of the Neanderthal Saucer Men Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. ~ Oscar Wilde This is the Holiday Season in the early Twenty-first Century. We’ve cracked the human genome! We all carry around the sum of human knowledge… Continue reading The GOP’s Hypocrisy on Socialism
“The good Earth—we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy.” —. Kurt Vonnegut Hello. My name is Sean Davis and this is my second dispatch from the Apocalypse. Human civilization ended a while back, and even though I see a few other people finally realizing it, on the whole, most… Continue reading Horse Dewormer & Robot Overlords
October 4, 2021, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Oculus crash for over five hours. Just one more seal broken in this Apocalypse. 3.5 billion people not only go without their daily spikes of the neurotransmitter dopamine in their brains, but because they use Facebook to sign into other apps, millions can’t sign into their shopping… Continue reading Dispatch 6 – We have angered the Algorithm.
Here is the first dispatch from an ongoing series where I talk about COVID19, Climate Change, and Prescription Drug Mascots. Dispatches from Behind Enemy Lines, After the Collapse of Human Civilization, Planet Earth, August, 19, 2021 – Dispatch 1 The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.… Continue reading Dispatches from the Apocalypse
This episode we talk about Hemingway’s first big break through book, The Sun Also Rises. We also talk about Hemingway’s Iceberg theory on writing, Hem’s favorite Bourbon, and his use of gender and sexuality in the novel. This book was written about his life after WWI. It follows a group of ex-patriots who live in… Continue reading Bourbon, Beer, & Books The Podcast – The Son Also Rises
June 1st, 2020, Donald Trump orders Lafeyette Square cleared of protestors. Unidentified federal troops shoot CS Gas and use flashbangs at US Citizens exercising their Constitutional Rights.
Only weeks later, unidentified troops come to Portland, Oregon, using the same tactics on Black Lives Matter Protesters outside the Federal Building. Purple Heart Veterans Sean Davis and Kevin Pannell decide they can’t sit on the sidelines while the country they bled for is distorted and abused.
Sean Davis, Kase Johnstun, Jessi Marsh, and Trevor Baierl came together and created a documentary that shows that this administration knowingly created a private army from various federal agencies and contractors and sent them to Portland in hopes to create chaos, purposely premeditated in the hopes to intimidate. Here is the documentary for you to watch first:
A Very Close Call
September 30th was the twenty-third day of the rebuilding and recovery effort after the Holiday Farm Fire, and many Mckenzie River residents had been working every day, 12 to 16 hours sometimes, since the fire started, most without a day off. That Wednesday was McKenzie River resident Shaney Howard’s 50th birthday. He and his partner Vanessa East had just served pulled pork and the dozen or so guests were eating and trying to drink their first beer of the day when we noticed the light of a fire illuminating the tree branches on the property next to Shaney’s. We all agreed it was a poor time to burn yard debris.
The fire grew, and Tyee Burwell went to check it out. A minute later, he yelled that the next door neighbor’s trailer was on fire. Kelly Davis and Elisha Young told the children to get off the trampoline and got them all together. Tyee ran across Hwy 126 and pounded on the front door of the assistant fire chief. I drove to the Upper Mckenzie Fire Department to get help. Within minutes the big yellow Type 1 Fire Engine showed up with a single driver. Tyee Burwell grabbed a nozzle and took off running. I fed him the hose as he ran. Brandon Young grabbed a second nozzle and I fed him hose too. I’ve been on dozens of fires with a Type 6 engine as a wildland firefighter, but I’ve never learned how to charge a line on a structural Type 1 engine. I started pulling levers and pushing buttons. The water cannon on the front started shooting water until I undid what I did. I pulled another lever and the water shot out the back, and I undid that too. Finally, after a bit of fumbling, we had both lines charged. Tyee has fought fires most his life, and Brandon Young is a navy veteran who served time in a submarine. He had thorough training on how to put out a fire.
Kelly Davis drove down North Bank to let everyone know that there was a fire in McKenzie Bridge and that they may have to evacuate. Many people gathered in the parking lot of the McKenzie General Store and waited. Others sat at the McKenzie Station Pub and had a beer or cocktail and kept a wary eye down the highway.
The Upper McKenzie Fire Department has done such an amazing job over the past few weeks, we know they are tired and many are displaced, so we were happy that we had the fire just about out before Chief Plews and her crew showed up. Tyee Burwell handed off the nozzle and told everyone he was going back to finish his pulled pork sandwich. Vanessa East, the hostess of the party did offer slices of her custard pie before people left.
The trailer was a total loss, but if the fire had started burning the shop next to it full of fuels, propane, and other explosive material, this could have turned into another very big fire taking another town on our river. The loss of the trailer is very tragic, but at least no one lost their lives or were injured. When we finished our meals and maybe another beer, most of us went home to prepare for day twenty-four of the rebuilding and recovery effort for our community.
The Trump Parade coming into town. I shared this on Facebook. Trying to be neutral, I didn’t give my opinion on video. The video has gone viral and I guess thousands of trump supporters have shared it and many of them assume I’m like minded and have tried to friend me on. * Vietnam Veteran Joe Cantrell at the Oregon Vietnam Veterans Living Memorial by the Zoo in Portland. * Me talking to John Dupuis, a marine and combat veteran who studied for a degree in Homeland Security and Emergency Management. We spoke about how the Dept. of Homeland Security was meant to be used and how it is being used today. * Long day, a lot of walking, but we were getting the shots we needed. * We stopped to interview John at Powell Butte. Such a beautiful part of Portland, right in the middle of the city. * A new elk was dropped off at the site of the old elk statue. Portland artists being a part of the movement. * Black Lives Matter protestors across from Blue Lives Matter protestors right by the Federal Courthouse downtown. * * Too true * It was a beautiful day in Portland. We got some drone footage on the Burnside Bridge. * Street art downtown. * This is where the shooting occurred downtown. * This is hard to see, but it’s the elk head on the new statue. * A block away from the shooting the food carts were busy. * * The only evidence of the shooting was a burnt trump flag in the street. * * Andy Mingo helped us get some drone footage. This is amazing. It really ups the production value of our doc. Andy is so awesome. * Andy and Lucas getting some more awesome drone footage. * * * Most of the building are boarded up, but the businesses are empty because of COVID, not protesting. There are marches and BLM events during the day. We went to a bunch, but they are all peaceful during the day. *
From August 27 to Aug 31 our documentary team came to Portland to film the second half of our Portland interviews. Kase drove from Ogden, Utah, and Jessi came up from LA. We were expecting to get a few interviews but we ended up getting a lot more than we thought.
While much of the world believes Portland is a Battleground, we fought against this idea, but after the invasion of the hundreds of people who support this president poured in the city, we found that Portland is a Battleground in a way. Mayor Wheeler and President Trump have been going back and forth, insulting each other. The president sent federal troops to Portland to gas and arrest protestors.
The morning after the shooting, where the Patriot Prayer member was shot and killed, there was nothing left but a burnt Trump flag. People were eating at the Food Carts on Washington only a block away. During the daytime, businesses are coming back. We had lunch many times downtown at the Independent, a sports bar close to the hotel. But every night and throughout the day, there are marches, concerts, and protests.
The Trump Parade came out of nowhere and we just happened to be right there. When they drove into town, many were on top of their cars or hanging out the windows. Right when they got into town there was a bi-racial couple walking down the street. The young, high school or early college aged kids in the cars started in on them, yelling at them. No one used the N word, but they were shouting derogatory words at them. The Black man flipped them off.
Two young Portlanders on bikes drove close to one of the trucks and stole one of their MAGA hats and gave it to the Black man from the bi-racial couple.
These trump supporters came in looking for a fight. They came from Idaho, Washington, and Eastern Oregon and drove into Portland, encouraged to conceal carry weapons, looking to poke Portland in the eye, and it ended in someone getting shot And killed.
I didn’t like it, honestly, because I could tell they were looking down on who they saw as lawless hippies, and they hated the people of Portland without knowing the residents or the city. At the same time, I felt if they could keep it from being violent they were peacefully protesting. I encourage peaceful protest. I think that’s what this documentary is all about. But then I saw the trump supporters were shooting random bystanders with paint balls and bear spray, running through them with their big trucks, and finally walking the streets looking for trouble.
We may be done filming in Portland, but maybe not. Someone reached out to me and just told me that the federal troops are on their way back. We’ll see.