True Snapshots of Nothing to do With Anything

By TRB

This is an off-the cuff piece of writing because you see I already had a column ready to go. You know what it was about. That recent event you can't get away from. No matter where you go the conspiracy theories will make sense for five or six minutes until they dissolve into warm sugar and you get all stuck up in this madness. You don't need it.

The rest of the details are so-so and so what and so, who cares? Chest thumping is something that Silver Back Gorilla's do to announce to their harems that they've had just about enough, they are the king of the hill, and thump thump, thump. Hell they have Silver Backs what does that tell you? To me is says, Oh crap watch out, that guy's got a silver back. But even a Gorilla is a relatively peaceful animal. It wants to live and let live. It is a vegetarian.

So this latest chapter in the WTC tragedy is over for me as a writer at least. I find it interesting only in the fact that the men wearing the white hats and the men wearing the black hats are equally responsible for the fall of those buildings. I find it interesting that the entire incident grows out of the unfair treatment of a people in the Middle East that they could not get justice because Israel and the U.S. would not let them have it, that one thing led to another and suddenly the entire Middle East with the exception of the fat cat nations we support like Saudi Arabia hated everything our nation stood for.

Or have people already forgotten the way this all came about, have they revised history? Hey Mr. "USA USA," take it from someone who knows something about these things - you will never know. You will never know. So, please put your flag down and have some coffee.

I promised I wouldn't write about you-know-what at the start of this. I am afraid I haven't completely come through. But it is hard when 24/7 that is all the news you get. Hey, what ever happened to the debt ceiling? How about unemployment? Home foreclosures? The need to re-industrialize? The broken health care system. The stupidly unregulated banking system? The weakness of the dollar? The uncontrolled speculation on oil prices? At this rate we might as well talk about my worst ever girlfriend.

She was a funny person. She was a movie star. She was banned from just about every bar I took her into. A nasty drunk she started off jovial turned suddenly to sarcasm and then straight into personal insults and threats of bodily harm.Yes there were so many pleasant nights out. So many nights I will never forget. But you know how everyone's got their thing. That was hers. None of us are perfect.

I was writing too much back in those days and I wrote six novels. And people came around and said Hey Michael what you gonna do with those novels? And I thought about it and I thought about it. And I just never got to a place in my mind where I could part with them. I had this wonderful circa 1800 southern dresser. It was not a custom piece but a country more home-made piece. I took those six novels and I scanned a little of them and just stacked them into the bottom drawers of this dresser

Over the years they have given me so much confidence. Perhaps because I wrote them in a year's time, two months per novel, eight weeks. And not one of them less than 350 pages. It was a marathon I guess. And I won. I didn't need to go through the whole publishing insanity with my agent although she did - when I wasn't looking - get a hold of some publishers. Nevertheless I declared them off limits and off limits they remain. It is funny how just knowing they are there makes me feel good. Yes, for the paranoid they are also on disk and in a safety deposit box, And they are probaby bad anyway.

I began with a crazy girlfriend but by my lived life has some nurses and nurses and nurses in it. How did I ever get stuck on nurses? Really is it the uniform? It was never that for me. Maybe I am not a uniform guy. Maybe it was the hospital smell, When I was younger I was sort of a double threat. So I developed a taste for hospital air. I could have three girlfriends at the same time and still do well in school. We hung out with the kids who would have put tire tracks across your kid's head today.

We swam nude everywhere even at public beaches. We actually crashed cars on purpose. We used to think we were something. I remember jumping out of an airplane in the middle of the night over the Wasatch Mountains in Utah. We had some Belgium paratroopers with us. We were testing a new chute, one that had never been tested in these conditions. I remember when my static line snapped me out into silent air and I looked down and I saw a postage stamp size drop zone increasing in size as I sped down to it. I thought for just a second, would this be more exciting without a parachute?

I don't know where I ever got that idea. Too much Hemingway, perhaps?

See, I have done it and I have provided you with a perfectly useless biography as well. You don't have to read about you-know-who. I don't have to write about him.

Only tomorrow I think I will get away from this garbage and back to the other garbage - national politics.