Myself When I’m Real

This Week in Music: 1983

May 17, 2013 By Sean Murphy 3 Comments

I don’t know what you were up to but I was partying like it was 1983.

Due to the miracles of technology, we can see precisely how I was living, almost exactly thirty years ago.

Let’s do a quick analysis of that picture.

Grey Levi’s cords? Check.

Untucked blue oxford? Check.

R2-D2 light switch and piggy bank (both home made, neither by me)? Check. (For those playing at home, this was before Return of the Jedi was released, and I was still on board the Millennium Falcon).

Napkin with note and autograph from Dexter Manley? Check.

Feathered hair covering the ears? Check.

A little Toulouse-Lautrec up in there? Certainement!

Cozying up to my boy, Mr. Mojo Risin’? Check. (More on him HERE.)

Jimi Hendrix poster with feathered roach clip? You know this.

(About those roach clips: anyone else remember when those were souvenirs, or prizes, from the Langston Hughes fairs? We used to hang them on our Duron paint caps. We had no idea what they were really used for and, presumably, neither did my parents. They probably thought I was respecting our Native American heritage and hey, Hendrix had Cherokee blood…)

The obligatory black light poster that we used to buy at Spencer’s? Check.

A floor speaker and a bookshelf, two components that still comprise my personal arsenal.

But what really inspired this trip down memory lane was a “From the vault” entry in the latest Rolling Stone –a magazine I started subscribing to right around this time. This particular entry features the Top 10 singles from the week of May 12, 1983, and it is indeed a trip, in many senses of the word. I wonder if this will bring you back (and I mean waaaaay back) the way it did me: 7th grade lockers, Mr. Bryant & Reston Skateway (for my local peeps), getting to second base (allegedly), and a hundred other things. Let’s run it down from top to bottom and shoot the proverbial duck. Wherever possible, I’ve embedded the proper video from MTV. (MTV!!! Here’s a trivia question I bet even people who know me best would get wrong: I did not, in fact, have access to this epic channel back in the day. My parents would not allow it. Wisely. That does not mean I did not log quality hours –and I mean hours– at myriad friends’ houses.)

1. Michael Jackson, “Beat It”:

re. The King of Pop:

A confession. I was not necessarily a fan. I certainly was able to appreciate that dancing, and that song (and any male my age who attempts to deny that he desperately wanted to perfect the moonwalk is lying through the acne-glazed haze of adolescent recollection). It was a bizarre time to be a teenager: all the girls in school loved Michael Jackson and all the guys loved Jim Morrison. Oh wait, that was just me? Well, as corny as I would have considered it for any dude to have a poster of MJ, I am not particularly proud to reconsider the prominent spread of leather-clad Lizard King photos on my bedroom wall. I say this only to underscore the impact MJ had at the time: I was well tired of the non-stop hype and ceaseless radio play (seven Top 10 singles?!), and it was simply beyond human capability to separate oneself from Thriller’s impact. You may not have loved it (you may not have liked it) but I have never spoken to anyone who actually hated it. I’m sure there is someone out there, who also hates the Sistine Chapel and The Lincoln Memorial. Or Moby Dick (just kidding, sort of.)

A lot more on MJ, and the ’80s, HERE.

2. David Bowie, “Let’s Dance”:

Kind of amazing –and humbling– that David Bowie appears to have aged less in three decades than me (or anyone else on the planet).

3. Greg Kihn Band, “Jeopardy”:

When Greg Kihn was born I believe his parents stood over him the way the gods once did at Olympus (“Clash of the Titans” style) and said: “Your purpose on this earth is to form a band and make an album called Kihnspiracy. Mission accomplished. (What have you done with your life?)

4. Men at Work, “Overkill”:

5. Thomas Dolby, “She Blinded Me With Science”:

This song is just as amazing today as it was then. That is all. (And don’t sleep on this slice of heaven.)

6. Dexy’s Midnight Runners, “Come On Eileen”:

All I had to do was type the letters “D-E-X” into YouTube and this was the first thing that came up. Obviously.

7. Irene Cara, “Flashdance…What a Feeling”:

13 year old Murph would like to send my personal thanks to Irene Cara for helping me through some…hard times. If you know what I’m saying.

8. Prince, “Little Red Corvette”:

Ridiculous video, but apparently the Prince police have disabled everything on YouTube.

re. Prince: idiots, like me, were not prepared to appreciate him, but time has taught us that this weird dude is a genius. Duh.

9. Laura Branigan, “Solitaire”:

Two words: Couples skate!!!

10. After the Fire, “Der Kommissar”:

Perfect way to end. What an unbelievable range of sounds, cultures and styles –and these were the most popular songs in the country. This, my friends, when people ask why we are so nostalgic, is the answer. Because the ’80s, when all is said and done, did not remotely suck!

But don’t take it from me, ask John Cusack!

Filed Under: Myself When I'm Real Tagged With: 80s, After the Fire, David Bowie, Dexys Midnight Runners, Duron, Greg Kihn Band, Irene Cara, John Cusack, Laura Branigan, Men at Work, Michael Jackson, MTV, Prince, Thomas Dolby

Every Time I Scribble A Thought With Artistic Intent

May 12, 2013 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

I’m fortunate, in a sense, to be the type of person that gets more sentimental about the times I read a certain book or heard a particular album than I ever do about holidays. But I’m still human. I still recall the almost breathless inability to accelerate time and make Christmas arrive more quickly. Or the Halloween costumes, Easter candy or the great Thanksgiving feasts (and the not-so-great family fights that would sometimes ensue). The holidays, as idealized rites of passage, still resonate; but these occasions are not capable of enhancing or obliterating whatever mood I’m already in. As such, the absence of my mother might feel more acute on holidays, but none of these events have been unduly marred during the past decade.

Surprisingly, even the week that presents a triptych of raw remembrance, comprising her birthday (August 23), and the anniversaries of her death (August 26) and funeral (August 30) have been bearable. These have become prospects for celebration, however somber, and I am mostly able to channel that grief into gratitude for the times she was around. Similarly, Mother’s Day is seldom joyful, but it provides an imperative to consider happy times and my relative good fortune—despite what is obviously lacking, now. It also obliges me to behold my family members and friends who have become admirable mothers themselves, and I am humbled to see my mother alive in the looks they give their children.

And if I’m ever inclined to stop and consider how corny, or manufactured these sentiments may be, I console myself with the awareness of how increasingly corny and manufactured holidays in America have become.

***

Any time I need to be reminded that I am one of the lucky ones, I look at the picture taken the day I was born. The pose is not unique; virtually every child has at least one frameable shot of the post-delivery adoring gaze. Or, every child fortunate enough to have been born in a hospital (or home) under safe conditions to a mother who welcomes the moment and, most importantly, is prepared for the moments (and days and years) that will follow. I don’t need to resort to religion or sociology: I can simply consider the circumstances and the infinitesimal odds that I ever made it from my father to my mother in the first place (if you know what I mean).

What child cannot recall asking, on Mother’s Day, why there wasn’t a Kid’s Day? The response was always the same: Every day is Kid’s Day. Most of us who have lived a single hour in the so-called real world quickly came to register how accurate this tired cliché actually is. Indeed, those of us who were sufficiently well-raised didn’t need to wait that long for this epiphany to occur. A year or two punching the clock, paying bills, cleaning up one’s own messes—the literal and especially the figurative ones—and generally attaining that independent status one strove so single-mindedly to attain is impetus enough for reflection. Not merely an appraisal of how impossible it would be to repay the investment made, measured in money, time, affection and approbation, but a recognition of what was truly at stake: the selflessness your parents displayed, putting in all that effort to enable you to become your own person. The best gift a parent can give (you come to understand) is loving you enough to allow you to not be exactly like them; to encourage you to figure out exactly who you are supposed to become.

***

Holidays have not been intolerable, no more than any other day, especially the bad days when I miss my mother most. As a result, I reckon I’m not the only one who has found that my birthday is the single occasion that can never be the same. Inexorable nostalgic pangs, the pull of biological imperatives, or the simple fact that I’m still human has ensured that the annual recognition of my birth day is imbued with sadness and a heavy longing I don’t feel any other time. If so, it seems a reasonable trade-off: that deep and uncomplicated connection, along with the longing any child can comprehend, signifies that yet another cliché holds true: absence makes the heart grow fonder.

Every time I scribble a thought with artistic intent I am inspired by the support my mother offered, going back to the days I was a kid with crayons, coloring outside the lines while listening to The Nutcracker Suite. She will never be forgotten; in fact, she will never be gone. This is what helps and it is also, at times, what hurts.

***

How do you get over the loss?

That is the question I asked a former girlfriend who lost her father when she was a teenager. “You don’t,” she said. Hearing this, you can acknowledge—and appreciate—the sentiment; you can easily empathize with how inconceivable it is to possibly heal from that kind of heartbreak. But it isn’t until you experience it that you comprehend the inexplicable ways this reality is an inviolable aspect of our existence: it’s worse than you could ever envision, but if you’re one of the lucky ones, it’s also more redemptory than you might have imagined. Mostly, you accept that a day will seldom pass when you don’t think of the one you loved and lost. And more, you wouldn’t have it any other way.

Every day is Kid’s Day, and who would hope to change that?

Every day, for me, is Mother’s Day. And on my birthday, I don’t celebrate myself so much as acknowledge—and appreciate—the one who did the most to help me get here.

* From a memoir entitled Please Talk About Me When I’m Gone.

Filed Under: Myself When I'm Real Tagged With: Mother and Child Reunion, Paul Simon, Please Talk About Me When I'm Gone

A Day To Remember; A Life To Celebrate

May 11, 2013 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

August 30, 2002*

Everything that is good about me is because of my mother.

Fortunately, I was able to convey this simple truth many times in my adult life, but one of the unexpected blessings of the past few weeks was that I had the opportunity to repeat it, often, and in so doing, I understood that the greatest gift I could give my mother was showing her that she was the greatest gift in my life.

Everyone that cares about Linda, or cares about one of us who love her, has had a certain heaviness in their hearts these past five years, as she has bravely battled this illness which ultimately claimed her body—only to ensure that her spirit could survive, like a million small fires inside of all our hearts. And so the hearts that once were burdened should be relieved, aided by the knowledge and acceptance that she found peace, that she was reminded, repeatedly and without reservation, how dearly she was loved every moment these past two weeks, that her act of dying defies death, because I can assure you, she is with me right now, and she has already found ways to comfort and console me that I could never have conceived.

It is an arduous, probably impossible undertaking, to attempt to find sense in the insanity of illness, to seek comfort from what seems an incomprehensible injustice, to calmly accept what the heart and mind have every reason—and every right—to reject.

However, as the great poet Longfellow wrote:

Lives of great souls remind us

We may make our lives sublime

And departing, leave behind us

Footprints on the sands of time.

The time was World War II, and like so many others of her remarkable generation, the little baby girl her parents named Linda came into the world on August 23, 1943, while her father, Martin, was half a world away honorably doing his duty for the country his own father had only recently learned to call home.

The first of seven siblings, she became in many regards a mother long before giving birth. It was a role she had already, in large part, perfected and prepared herself for—a preparation that would serve her well when she became a young mother, suddenly several thousand miles from the family she lived with and then left, along with her husband, having the courage and conviction to make their way and create a life of their own.

And so: a daughter, an older sister (always the older sister), a wife (always the same wife, married to the same man she fell in love with four decades ago), a mother (always a mother, making the fulfillment of others her primary purpose) and finally, a grandmother, a role she cherished and illustrated—against all probability—that her capacity for love and generosity was even more abundant: it was inextinguishable, unending…infinite.

And, of course, while the job of Grandma was one she was ideally suited for, she certainly had more than sufficient opportunity to see this function performed flawlessly by her own mother, who showed her the way to move on in the world, as a woman, a wife, mother and grandmother. Like everyone, the premature passing of her mother, Susan, indelibly shook her and while this was a loss she (and we) never fully recovered from (so profound was her love and admiration), she had the power to persevere, and intensify her already considerable efforts to bestow joy and hope to everyone in her life. And in this way, she defeated the darkness and in her admirable, inimitable fashion, turned the impetus for grief into the opportunity for great giving.

Therefore, the redemption and glory of this untimely loss is the timeless certainty of the life she lived, an enduring record of words, deeds, gestures and memories, all transcending the tempest of our brief time on earth. And her lasting legacy, the most gracious gift she could have given any of us, reinforces our faith, reawakens our resolve and strengthens our capacity for kindness and the struggle to live truly Christian lives.

It is not, in my estimation, inappropriate to assert this simple fact: each time we imitate the example Linda Murphy ceaselessly set, we are celebrating her life, and assuring each other that there is only one way to live.

How wonderful, and humbling, to acknowledge that all the tools, which enable you to pursue what you love in life are directly traceable to the example and encouragement of that person who put you first, above herself, and dedicated her life—made it her job—to make your life as positive and productive as possible.

The reason I can confidently and enthusiastically proclaim that my mother is still around is because of the obsessions that infuse my identity: the passion for art and expression, the advocation of justice and tolerance, the unending pursuit of honesty, integrity and compassion—these are inexorable imprints, they are, in fact, the essence of my mother, and her soul is in my soul, as it always has been, as it always will be.

I have long been aware that it is the very least I can do, in an effort to appreciate and honor the work my mother did, to endeavor each day to be more intelligent and aware, to act more kindly, give more generously, love more unreservedly, and exceed the expectations that even she held. It is the least any of us who were touched in some way by her life—her words, her deeds, her happiness, her heart—to spread that spark and do our parts to leave the world more abundant and meaningful than it otherwise might be.

Another poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, asked:

O Wind, If Winter comes

Can Spring be far behind?

What will I remember? I’ll remember everything. The things I’ve expressed and the things I saw, the things I still see in the eyes and actions of those around me. I will remember her as my first teacher and first friend, the angel who brought me into the world and allowed me to help her leave it. I will remember that soft, sweet silence, just like she had gone to sleep. Only more.

Everything that is good about me is because of my mother. I said that to her, then, and I say this to you, now, in the hope that when you see me, you see my mother, and when you see yourselves—especially when you reflect upon the ways in which her influence and example inspired and encouraged you—you will see Linda, and we can all do our part to honor her memory, and make sure that she never leaves us.

*Eulogy delivered at my mother’s funeral on August 30, 2002

Filed Under: Myself When I'm Real Tagged With: Bob Marley, Mother's Day, Please Talk About Me When I'm Gone

Props for Pops (71st Birthday Edition)

May 3, 2013 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

I have written more than once about my mother (here and here) but I haven’t said a great deal (here) about my old man. That is, in part, because he is still very much with us, and our story is still unfolding. For a variety of obvious reasons, I hope that continues to be the case for a long, long time.

But anyone who knows me understands that my relationship with the old guy (Pops, to me; Jack, to others, Pa, to his two grandchildren), which I’m happy to report has always been more than solid, is a non-negotiable facet of my existence. Certainly, after what he and I (and my sister and her husband) went through during and after the death of my mother, things could never be the way they were. On literal and figurative levels. When I talk to others about this inevitable part of many people’s lives (e.g., losing a parent long before it’s expected or acceptable), I usually offer the opinion, based on what I’ve witnessed and experienced, that the crisis either pulls families closer together or pushes them farther apart. At least once a day, on some level, I’m grateful that our family had the foundation to rally around one another and work together on healing, a process that is measured not in years or months or even weeks but in days and sometimes minutes. We went through it, together and we’ll go through it, together.

I had the opportunity to toast my old man on his (surprise) 60th birthday party, which occurred at his favorite local restaurant, Dante’s. It was amazing to take him back there Tuesday night for a mano a mano dining adventure (keyword: soft-shell crabs) and reflect on how much has changed in the last ten years. But mostly we did –and will– focus on how little has changed: it’s still family first, we celebrate all of these occasions together and I remain as grateful as I’ve always been that this good man brought me into the world. It’s a world I would have been ill-equipped to enter, as an adult, without his guidance and support. It’s a world I’m more grateful than I’ve ever been that he is still very much a part of. We will celebrate those bonds of love and devotion tonight, like we always do.

Enough. There are plenty of things to say about Pops, but today, on the occasion of his 68th (EDIT: 70th!) birthday, I would like to acknowledge, and celebrate, the bond of music that we (like my mother and I) share. Pops is no aficionado, but he has (some) game and I always am pleased to recall the handful of original LPs I happily stole from his collection. One of my earliest musical memories, along with the old Fantasia coloring book sessions, was Curtis Mayfield’s masterpiece, the soundtrack of Superfly. It is not an overstatement to suggest that this album set an aesthetic tone early in my formative development that made me more open (and, of course, susceptible) to all types of music. But no need to linger on the nuances; the nitty gritty of the situation is that holding the original fold-out double album of this blaxploitation classic was a seminal ’70s experience. It was immensely gratifying to give the old man a copy of the remastered reissue of this bad boy on his birthday in 1998.

Curtis Mayfield, “Freddie’s Dead”:

Another one that was in his slight but not unimpressive collection was the original pressing of Janis Joplin’s last joint, Pearl. I even have a picture of him, on his birthday (must have been ’71), happily holding the album up. Shame on me and not getting my scanner set up yet (stay tuned, and be forewarned). Of the “big three” who left us that unfortunate year, Pops never cared much for Jim, and never fell deeply in love (as he should have) with Jimi, but he did –and does– love Janis. Who could blame him?

Janis Joplin, “Get It While You Can”:

Wonderful memory: remember back in the ’80s when radio stations (even before “classic rock” stations became all the rage mid-decade) used to do their Top 500 countdowns on holidays (often either Memorial Day or Labor Day but occasionally July 4)? I used to live for those things and would listen, dutifully scribbling down the entries. Anyway, back in the early ’80s it was very unusual to hear unedited, long songs on the radio. So a song like Peter Frampton’s “Do You Feel Like We Do” was one of those rare treats you’d catch a couple of times a year, if you were lucky. I didn’t own that album (yet) but that only made it more of an event if/when it came on. During one of the countdowns, on July 4, this one came on and Pops and I were heading back from the pool to cook out pre-fireworks. The famous “talk box” section was yet to occur, so we pulled up in the driveway and Pops simply let the car idle. Too enraptured in the moment to even miss a few seconds before we could dash into the house and turn it on the stereo, we sat there, in our soaked swimsuits and savored the moment. These are the types of shared encounters that, I suspect, sustain the father-son relationship a decade down the road when curfews are being tested and new boundaries are being established.

Peter Frampton, “Do You Feel Like We Do”:

1980: there weren’t a ton of bands (or albums) that all of us could enjoy (and by all of us, I mean my parents and me because my sister was never on board although, by 1980 she was already a teenager, so we’ll forgive her), but Bob Seger’s Against The Wind definitely made the cut. In fact, that may have been the only album (aside from The Beatles’ Blue Album) that we owned on LP (mine), cassette (hers) and 8-track (his). Pops has always had a thing for Seger and insists he is a better live performer than Bruce Springsteen (he has never seen either in concert, so we’ll forgive him).

Bob Seger, “No Man’s Land”:

Speaking of 8-tracks…

The Ford Grenada (speaking of the early ’80s!) sported an 8-track and anyone who lived then may recall the not exactly cutting edge way this “technology” handled the transition from one “track” to the other: if a song had not ended before the next “track” was programmed, it would just fade out where it was, then click, and fade back in (I’m sure the artists at the time were thrilled with this development and the ways it butchered their songs). There are more than a handful of albums we owned that, to this day, I can remember (and still, not without some fondness, hear) where these transitions occurred. One of the albums from that era that warrants a serious reexamination is Pat Benatar’s debut In The Heat of the Night. That album holds up remarkably well (indeed, the only two songs I don’t listen to these days are the two hit singles, the generic FM paint-by-numbers anthem “Heartbreaker” and the egregious Blondie rip-off “We Live For Love”). I’m serious. If you haven’t listened to this one in ages, or never owned it in the first place, I’m sure you can –and should– get a used copy real cheap at Amazon.

Pat Benatar, “In The Heat of the Night”

Another band whose catalog we owned on 8-track was Heart. Speaking of another band that deserves a sustained critical endorsement (mental note): their first five albums were solid, and while Little Queen and Bebe Le Strange are minor masterpieces and the first album, Dreamboat Annie, has one of the great first sides of the ’70s, for my money their finest hour is 1978′s Dog and Butterfly. This one got much play in the Grenada and it still gets a lot of play at my crib. When she was in top form, as she is throughout this album, there were few voices as compelling and out and out sexy as Ann Wilson’s. (Pops had the LP version of Little Queen and I used to happily gaze at that front cover for hours. Still gives me a little tingle even today.)

Heart, “Mistral Wind”:

Pops is from Boston (as was my mother), so in addition to the accent he’s never lost (much to many of my friends’ delight), we cruised up north each Christmas and most summers. These were eight or nine hour jaunts (more if traffic or weather were issues and one or both invariably were) and I recall fantasizing, as a ten year old, how amazing it would be to just kick back and watch movies in the back to pass the time. I think of this now and how lucky today’s snot-nosed little brats are (not that I’m bitter or anything) to have video-on-demand installed into the headrest in front of them.

We got through those trips the old-fashioned way: painfully. Lots of reading, Mad Libs and music. Especially music. By the time I got to high school, sis was in college (ironically, in Boston) and moms usually flew the friendly skies, so it was a mano a mano adventure for many years. My father, being very much a man of routine, had (and has) his favorite discs (then cassettes) for each trip. Many, which we fortunately agreed upon, were mandatory, such as CCR (see below), Skynyrd (ditto), The Beatles (see above), Heart (ditto) and a handful of rotating flavors-of-the-year (I’m still not sure I’ve recovered from his infatuation with the Fine Young Cannibals circa 1989).

Funny story: one of the worst fights we almost got in was not due to alcohol, drugs, or a pregnant cheerleader, but whether or not we could (should) listen to the full (and, in hindsight, insufferable) 18 minute version of “In-A- Gadda-Da-Vida”. The fifteen year old me voted yes. Let me explain: this was the summer of either ’85 or ’86 and I was already long past the point where I took music a bit too seriously. At his request, I brought along one of my mixtapes (a long lost art I could have done graduate work in or made a career out of, had the world ever been kind enough to offer graduate degrees or paychecks for such consequential and benificent endeavors). Anyway, that song came on and about half-way through my pops –because he was sane– grew tired of the interminable organ and drum noodling, and since (although he is a seismologist, has a profoundly anti-technology acumen) he could not figure out how to fast forward the tape (you know, that fast forward button) he told me to move things along. I invited him to do it himself if he was so eager to get through the song. Hilarity ensued. Not one of my finer moments, but it was a matter of principle. And, considering I really did like that song at one time, and had not done any drugs, this proves two things: one need not be stoned, only immature, to find pleasure in Iron Butterfly; and I was, clearly, already pretty far down the rabbit hole in terms of the whole music thing.

Iron Butterfly, “In A Gadda Da Vida”

Usually, there were no issues regarding music. Mostly because it’s not that difficult to fill up nine hours. The trips almost always kicked off with CCR, not only one of the all-time great American bands, but absolutely perfect road trip music. Full props to the old man for having an original LP copy of the almost-immaculate Cosmo’s Factory, which I spun like a squeaky clean Jeffrey Lebowski.

Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Long As I Can See The Light”:

Otis: Because sometimes you have to break out the big guns.

Otis Redding, “Pain In My Heart”:

I knew I liked Skynyrd (I remember when “That Smell” got played on the radio in ’77/’78, and thinking that nobody else sounded like they did) but I did not know I loved Skynyrd until I asked for –and received– the double LP Gold & Platinum for my 12th birthday. This one has the (incredible) live version of “Gimme Three Steps” and, of course, the ultimate (live) Bic Lighter anthem “Free Bird”. Later on I crafted a mix that incorporated more material from the very overlooked Second Helping, but that original cassette copy kept us energized, and sufficiently southern, as we headed north of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Lynyrd Skynyrd: “Simple Man”:

More on the musical memories, and Pops, another time. For now, it’s good enough to give credit where it’s due, celebrate a beloved father’s continued health, and acknowledge 68 (EDIT: 70!) well-lived years. Most of all, it’s nice to know this particular story is still being written.

Filed Under: Myself When I'm Real Tagged With: Bob Seger, CCR, Curtis Mayfield, Iron Butterfly, Janis Joplin, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Otis Redding, Pat Benatar, Peter Frampton

Albert Hofmann, R.I.P.

May 2, 2013 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

Talk about better living through chemistry!

Albert Hofmann, the chemist who invented/discovered LSD, has passed away at the dignified, enviable age of 102.

On April 16, 1943, he made history.

On April 19, 1943 he described it.

“In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed (I found the daylight to be unpleasantly glaring), I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours this condition faded away.”

Spring*

May 1, 2013 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

95 South:

Eventually, the skyline turns from gray to green, with trees instead of telephone poles and hills instead of hotels on either side. On the tops of these hills, in between the forest and the freeway, the animals stood around, detached and mostly disinterested. Not quite believing what they looked down upon, they wryly observed the random madness rushing past. Instinctively, it seemed, most of them kept a safe distance, not wanting to partake in or become a part of the carnage of the twentieth century as it cruised by.

And then you slowly enter the South. Everything gets a little heavier: the scenery, the air, and the nonexistent breeze in the late afternoon of an unseasonably warm May. It’s not unlike the languid buzz bourbon delivers: you taste it and sense what is coming, and the deeper you go, the more intimate and intense it all becomes, and before you know it, you are exactly where you set out to be, whether or not you ever intended to get there.

The first thing you notice is the green. The trees, an impervious halo, hover around the highway. Suddenly, somehow, everything is green, greener than anything you’ve ever seen, so green it’s arresting and almost unreal to actually behold. You cannot believe how green it is: at some point it compels you to consider that for all the billions of trees we’ve butchered, it is extraordinary in its own marginal way how they have managed to remain relatively plentiful. It’s almost impossible to imagine how things used to look, in the days before before Cortez and Custer did their manifestly destined duties that are well-documented in textbooks made from the paper made from the trees they helped tear down.

And then a minor sort of miracle occurs as Maryland, without warning, becomes Virginia. Trees, with roots and branches extending into either state, stand at attention, hoping never to choose sides if brothers take up arms against one another for a second time.

Northern Virginia is an anomaly, it is neither here nor there; it is the gateway to the real south. The Washington Metropolitan Area is, in many ways, a bulwark against identity, a sort of spurious, neutral ground between North and South, Mason-Dixon Line be damned. Everyone to the north of northern Virginia correctly considers it the South; everyone south of Northern Virginia feels, not infeasibly, that it is the North.

You are nowhere near Faulkner country yet, but you are also, already, half a world away from Cheever’s concrete commotion, from Whitman’s lazy leaves of grass, from Updike’s arrogant New England imbroglio. When you open your eyes, you are somewhere else, staring expressively at the world around you, at the verdant trees looming overhead, at the inestimable expanse of lucid skies that stretch up and away. You see different colors, fully flowering in their fleet glory: the air has changed from salt to soot and again to honeysuckle, the taste of almond—the bounty of Spring—is on your tongue. You hear strange birds calling, and somehow you can understand this other language, words welcoming you into another world, words that welcome you home.

*excerpt from The American Dream of Don Giovanni

Filed Under: Myself When I'm Real Tagged With: Spring, Vivaldi

The Long Way Home (Revisited)

March 29, 2013 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

If I ever need to check myself and consider what a privileged life I’ve led, I simply need to recall that moving across town in the summer of ’79 was a traumatic event. True, it was about four miles door to door from old house to new house. Also true, since nine year olds can’t drive, four miles may as well be four hundred. More truth: I was fortunate enough to grow up in a neighborhood that even Norman Rockwell could not have painted. (Which is just as well, because I’ve always found Norman Rockwell kind of creepy. Put another way, cats like Jackson Pollock make more sense to me as I grow older, and good old Norman, besides being predictable, bland and boring, also seems, in retrospect, to reinforce the cliches he often embraced in his crackerjack portraits of cracker America.) A more straightforward way of putting it would be to simply state that there were a ton of kids in my neighborhood. It was early ’70s planned community paradise: no matter what was actually going on inside the individual houses, the collective population of kids ensured healthy representation in any game of kickball, baseball, soccer or the obligatory summer ritual of ding dong ditch. (For anyone too young to actually know what that last one means, rest assured the game had everything to do with dinging and ditching, and nothing to do with our dongs.)

All of this is to say that I grew up, like many kids in Reston, surrounded by boys and girls of or around my age. It wasn’t because it was perfect (it wasn’t) or that there was no turmoil (there was), it was because of the make-it-up-as-you-go sensibility that prevailed in this town (in this country?) during the early to late ’70s presented a fairly ideal petri dish for a distinctly suburban kind of acculturation.

plaza

(Put still another way: no matter what decade or what neighborhood one grows up in, if you aren’t fortunate enough to have a good foundation you have a significant, and unfair strike against you from the start.)

More about Reston another time, but a few brief words about our awkward Utopia are in order. Lest anyone, understandably, think this was some type of Stepford Wives experiment or that my depiction is merely the Byzantine nostalgia of a Proust freak, let me establish some street cred with two words: Burger Chef. Our town was not yet cool enough to have a McDonalds (in hindsight, I realize our town was too cool to have a McDonalds); we made due with the chain who invented the Happy Meal, originally known as the Fun Meal. You better recognize.

It was also, of course, a town in transition: it grew as we grew up (it’s still growing today, as are we). For those of us who did not stray far, it seems fair to suggest that some of the affection we feel is inextricably connected to watching things change (the town, ourselves). All towns transform, age and renew, but Reston seemed to exist as the touchstone of modernity even as it was designed to be self-consciously retro (three words: Lake Anne Plaza). In this regard, the evolution from quaint (one street light in the early ’70s) to cutting edge (the Metropolis also known as Reston Towncenter) was personal: it all went down on our watch. For me, it is significant on a variety of levels that I can head west on the W&OD trail and, in less than half an hour, be engulfed in a soundproof canopy of green and feel like it’s early part of a new century (circa 1909). I also like living in the shadow of the old Virgina Gentleman distillery, and I felt like I could hear history whisper every time I walked my dog past that place.

The last remnant of the Virginia Gentleman distillery

What else? Trying to recapture childhood and the indelible and often inexpressible ways it affects you is like remembering what it felt like to hold a firefly: as an adult, you understand the science that makes it glow but as a kid it really is magic (I’m still enthralled not necessarily because I retain my formative capacity for wonder, but because I actually don’t understand the science that makes it glow…). I attempted, several years ago, to recollect that time and mentality, after revisiting it with a five year old (my niece) and wondering what that broken in neighborhood looked like to younger eyes (hers and mine). That poem, called Old School (a title I defend since I wrote it before the excellent film of the same name was released) is below.

But getting back to summer ’79. As devastated as I was to leave my boys behind (especially my oldest friend Mark Seferian, with whom I appear at the top and bottom of this page–pictures taken on the day we revisited our old stomping grounds), I was also pretty excited about the new Kiss album (an album I still endorse, mostly for moments like this and this). I was giving up 7-Eleven but gaining a High’s which was effectively trading the all-star Cola Slurpee for a player to be named later: in this case the revelatory Slush Puppie (the highlight of August ’79 was discovering that the woman behind the counter would allow you to mix and match flavors, leading to early chemistry experiments like the grape/lime or the inimitably perfect raspberry/cherry). The other high point of that formative summer was the glory of NASL which many of us did not realize was already in the early stages of its semi-tragic (if self-inflicted) death spiral. Let me recap the calculus of birthday party apotheosis, circa mid-to-late ’70s: Farrell’s, seeing movies like this and going to RFK to see a Dips game.

Summer of ’79 redux:

It was a pretty great time, musically, as well. Of course there was plenty of crap, like there always is, but there were some magical moments as well. And don’t think I’m going to sleep on this one. And this one had particular resonance, especially for a nine year old who was a tad too sensitive for his own good. And to put some things in perspective (too much fuckin’ perspective, to quote Spinal Tap), can we talk about how long ago 30 years actually was, in regards to fashion, music, and culture? If a picture can say a thousand words, a song can say a million; and a video of the song (especially a video performed on a TV special) is capable of limitless expression. In other words, this was the number one hit thirty years ago today (and more on Donna Summer, HERE):

From Forest Edge to Terraset; from Tall Oaks to Newbridge; from the Green Arrows to the Whitecaps; from Carter Lake to Lake Audobon. Anyone but a kid about to enter fourth grade would have been thrilled with these upgrades. At the time, it felt like my parents were plucking me out of recess and placing me in detention. Moving into a new development on a new side of town, with no prospects of neighbors for several months (actual friends my age? Forget about it) was almost unendurable. The five weeks before school started were the closest I ever came to purgatory. And I laugh at how amusing that sounds, today: five weeks? I feel like I could take a nap that lasts that long, but back then, you didn’t live by weeks or days or even hours: you lived by moments. And nothing made time pass faster than playing with people your own age. Having fun. Being active and involved: no time for thinking.

Remember: this was an era way before Internet and iTunes; before video games and cable TV. For this I am forever grateful. Coincidence or not, this was right around the time I became a voracious reader, and my imagination began to come alive. I had always drawn (do kids over the age of five even draw anymore, or do they reach right for the joystick and the iToy?): first monsters and then soccer players and eventually the members of Kiss. Around this time I started to put little stories alongside those pictures. And I kept reading. Within a year I was keeping my first journal, and that was that. I was on my way (still not sure where I was headed, or where I’m going, but I’m sure I’ll let myself know when I get there).

Some of this, undoubtedly, had to do with my age and not my environment. But there is little question that during an exceptionally formative period in my development I learned how to tolerate, and eventually enjoy, my own company. The best way, I found, to accomplish this was to surround oneself with kindred souls. Hence, the books, the music and the cultivation of a creative ambition. Habits I had to learn, then, saved me from the not-so-quiet desperation of a happy and healthy nine year old suddenly shifted to neutral. Looking back, I understand and appreciate the ways they shaped my sensibility over the years, delivering me from an altogether different sort of despair.

********

Old School

This is old school, I say
To my niece who, at five years old, is now
The same age her uncle was when his parents
Transported him to this place—new then, old now.
Old school, she repeats, repeating things
I say because I am older, because I am
Still interesting, because I am…old school.
Even I can see that.

You Can’t Go Home Again, someone once wrote
And he was wrong.
Of course you can—all you have to do is never leave—
Leaving it behind does not mean it leaves you.
(And certainly I can’t be the only grown child
who returns often—in dreams, in memories and yes,
in my mind, I must confess: earnestly, ardently, often—
to the old streets that I came to outgrow
the way we outgrow games and bikes and friends
and exchange them for jobs and cars and co-workers).

You can always go home, and you need to go home,
It is only when you want to go home that you should
Start asking yourself some serious questions.

“Did you play kick the can?” my niece does not ask.
Nor does she ask if I ever played
Red Rover Come Over or Smear the Queer.
Those games got outgrown, or else we learned
To play them in ways not measured in bravado & bruises.
And I wonder if we are better off:
Growth granting us the eventual awareness that everyone is
Queer and no enjoys being…

I put away childish things each time I think
About them, storing them safely inside my heart
Where grown-up games can’t make them say Uncle.

“Uncle, did you play?” she does not say.
(She does not know everything but she knows
enough to understand that her uncle was never young
the way she is and the way she’ll always be and
far be it from me to tell her any differently).
Question: Can you play?
Remember when that’s all we used to say—
Summers summarized in a phrase we learned
Eventually to outgrow.

This uneven field (Field of Dreams, I’ll never say)
Was our Fenway and with tennis ball and wooden bat
We righted the wrongs of an evil world, where
Yaz never struck out, Bucky Dent was a blip
And the Curse of the Bambino played off-Broadway
Those days, that ceaseless, sweltering summer in 1978.
(Summer, seventies, Schlitz—not malt liquor, my friend,
this was strictly old school—no bull. I remember
block parties, warm beer, burnt marshmallows, mosquitoes
and putrid bug repellent that didn’t kill anything
but made us stronger (Don’t let the bed bugs bite, I’ll never say).
I had no idea how much I did not know but
I knew this much: if there was a beer besides Schlitz or
Bud I was unaware of it—that’s all
The adults drank back in the bad old days.

Play ball! no one needed to say because we played ball
Anyway—ball was our business and business was good,
Get it: the ball would invariably make a break for it
Ending up in the gutter (we called it sewer but, of course,
We were old school). Without a second thought
We pried off the manhole cover and dashed down into semi-darkness.
We never thought twice about it—we were young.
The game must go on! no one needed to say, we knew.
(I look now, and think: I would not go
into that hole for all the allowance money I never earned—
I know there are rats and who knows what else
Down there: the things our parents never realized
They should warn us about).
We never worried about the things that were not
Waiting for us, down there in the darkness.

“What are they doing?” I do not ask aloud,
Noticing—just in time, before I can call attention to it—
Two cats in coitus, doing what they do when they are young & free.
That’s something I’ve never seen and as I worry about
My niece asking me about it I understand: I’m old now.
Old school, I cannot say (to myself I say this).
That’s how it happens.
This would never have happened, then—
(I did not know much, but I knew this:
cats did not fornicate and kids fought only with fists).
But this is what happens when you go away.
Back then, in our close and cloistered community
Even the cats had discretion (they were old school)
Or maybe they were mortified, because
Bent over with booze or barbiturates they were
Silently screeching behind closed doors—
All of us, unknowingly, out in the light
Winning the World Series, while wicked women
Garrisoned themselves in dark alleys, behind
The anodyne of automatic garage doors.
It is quiet, now. Our mothers were so quiet, then.
Please allow them to have been happy,
In our memories if not in their actual lives.

I don’t remember but I have a feeling
That if I think hard enough I will recall
The things that were never said and therefore never forgotten.

I drink in the past and am reminded of youth,
Which tastes unlike anything other than what it is: freedom.

Cold, sour Schlitz (of course I took a taste)
With those incredibly awkward silver ring-tabs
We pulled off for the privilege of first sip.
That is old school, I do not tell my niece.
It’s only when you’re older that beer tastes
Like freedom, but it’s a borrowed brilliance,
A manufactured feeling, just like in class
How it’s cheating if the answer is already in your lap.
It’s the things they can’t package or make you pay for:
Those things that they never tell you about until you are old enough
To know better: that is what freedom is.

Curiosity killed the cat, someone once said and
Maybe they were right.
But something is going to get all of us
Eventually, whether we ask for it or understand it.

The cats are gone, maybe they have gone home
(they can always go home), back to their families—
The heavy silences and signified banality of routine
(do they still have strict rules about no TV
and everyone present around the table when
dinner is served at six-thirty sharp?
I certainly hope so, for their sakes).
Or maybe they are getting down to business—
Dirty deeds and dirty work go hand in hand—
Down in the darkness, doing their thankless task,
Keeping the sewers safe from rats and reality.
Curious or content, we know enough to take
Whatever it is that life decrees.

We went into the sewers the way we went into the world:
Unafraid, unwavering, unencumbered and
Above all: unconcerned about all those things
Older people were kind enough to never…

“Old school!” my niece repeats, curious
because she does not comprehend at all.
Old school, I do not say, reticent
Because I do remember it (all).
If curiosity doesn’t kill us, contentment gets there quicker.

How did we go down there, then?
How do we go out there, now?

3-20-02

serf

Filed Under: Myself When I'm Real

Two Years To Write, One Year To Revise…

March 28, 2013 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

Exactly one year ago, I wrote the following words:

It takes a village to raise a family; it takes a forest to write a book.

They are true, both of those statements. At least if you hope to do either (raise a family, write a book) as well as possible.

I can’t speak to the former, but I can certainly talk about the latter, having it done it (depending on what counts and how one counts) at least four times.

And I can attest to the rush of adrenaline, the joy of attainment, the sense of closure, crossing that proverbial finish line.

And not just the thrill of accomplishment, that box checked, that mission completed, but the fact that you are still alive; you lived to see it through. I don’t expect anyone who has not experienced the ecstasy and exhaustion (physical, spiritual) of undertaking such an ill-advised, audacious adventure to comprehend such a seemingly inane observation. But it’s true: once you are more than half-way into a project, you actually worry about it, you really do go there: What if I die before I finish; what if I’m not alive to see the reward of all this solitary effort? All kinds of questions, all of which beg more questions.

Question: Who has the temerity to sit down and write a book?

Answer: People who want to, people who need to.

It’s that simple, that impossible. But to think there are people who may want to actually read it? That’s where it gets tricky. Or not, actually. In a sense, getting it done is the ultimate objective, and the only thing the writer can control. It’s the only thing the writer can measure himself against. Although it’s more than that; it has to be, or else it would remain hidden, inside a diary intended for an audience of one. So it’s equal parts faith and compulsion that enables one to navigate the choppy waters of putting it all on the page, for public viewing.

In any event, I was flush with that fulfillment exactly one year ago. I did it; I’d made it (in at least two senses of the word).

Even then, I understood (from experience): it can’t –and shouldn’t– go out into the world until it’s ready.

Question: How do you know when it’s ready?

Answer: Who knows.

Any writer worth anything is seldom, if ever, satisfied with the finished product. That’s not vanity, it’s integrity. It’s not about the work or even the writer; it’s about respect and awe for the act of creation, and trying to get it exactly right.

If you had told me, one year ago, that I would be working on and revising the manuscript for another twelve months…I probably would have believed it. No point in putting in all that effort if you aren’t willing to put in all the effort. All it takes.

And, as always, it seems incredibly pretentious and unsatisfying to discuss it. Who wants to read a writer talking about how and why he writes? I don’t (unless it’s a writer I admire, and even then, it’s usually the same routine, similar words from people doing identical things: that fact is at once comforting and intimidating).

As ever, it’s never over until it’s over. But I’m working on it. The work remains in progress, and we’ll see where we stand a year from today.

L’amour de l’art fait perdre l’amour vrai.

I did not say that.

Although that is the sort of thing I might say, since I am the sort who feels obliged to quote the books I’ve read and I allow art to remind me how to relate to myself.

The love of art means loss of real love.

Some people, sometimes, choose to make their lives more complicated. Life, sometimes, decides for them; sometimes life gets there first.

To win? To lose?

What for, if the world will forget us anyway?

I didn’t write that. A poet wrote that. I’m no poet. Poets are always looking for things, like heroes. Who wants to be a hero these days? Who can afford it? The world could be—and might very well already be—full of folks who will ring changes and do their part to shake up the constricting and crazed institutions that keep us chained, bound and complacent. There are lots of these people, I’m sure: tons and tons of them. But the thing is, most of us are too busy trying to live. It’s enough to just survive without seeking to pursue such lofty, such poetic propositions.

This is the new poetry: the more things stay the same, the more they change. Here is our art: haikus of horror in the cities, sonnets of sin and corruption, limericks of deregulation, free verse free trade, rhymed lines of laissez-faire, and the emboldened ghost writer, Death, forever at work on our collective life stories.

These days we look for poetry in all the wrong places. Some of us even believe we are gazing more deeply into the murky waters of existence when all we are actually seeing is our own reflections.

And so (I think): A life is not unlike a novel: too often they are eager to please, predictable, safe. I think: you should, therefore, feel obliged to occasionally ask yourself complicated questions. Such as: what are you doing to keep things interesting? What can you do to generate momentum, keep the narrative flowing?

Listen: When some of your best friends are people who exist elsewhere—characters in books you’ve read, musicians you’ll never meet, people from the past who died decades (even centuries) before you were born, or people you knew intimately who are no longer around—it might be time to ask some complicated questions.

Who are you?

That is, or should be, the first question, as well as the last question, and it should be asked as often as possible along the way.

You see, all men are islands. After all, no one else is inside you when you’re born, no one is going with you when you die, and between those first and last breaths, the decisions, actions and accountability are your own. All, all yours.

So: you find friends, you seek solace in yourself, you learn to discern redemption through the aimless affairs that comprise the push and pull of everyone’s existence. You realize, in short, that you are going through it alone, so you should never go through it alone. You can’t run away, and the farther you run, the closer you get to yourself. And you’re all you’ve got.

If you are fortunate enough to figure this out early on, you find friends: the real ones who exist in your everyday world, and the other ones who have been there all along, the ones you can always turn to, wherever or whoever you happen to be.

Please talk about me when I’m gone. That is the title of this memoir. It is also the presumptive title of any memoir. More, it’s the unwritten title of any work of art—a desire to have those thoughts and feelings articulated, read, understood, appreciated. More still, it’s the often unexpressed message of any individual life: we want to be discussed, loved, and celebrated after we’re no longer around. Mostly we do not want to be quickly or easily forgotten.

When you hear voices, or find yourself talking to people you are not sure can hear you, you should cut yourself some slack. We’ve all been there—or will be at some point. We’ve all, on occasion, looked up to the clouds and wondered if there was a kingdom beyond the skies, the place some of us were told our dearly departed looked down from. Haven’t we all, on occasion, taken comfort from a one-way conversation we forgot to be self-conscious about? Aren’t we all, at times, unable or unwilling to entirely abandon the idea that someone else is listening?

And so: you talk. And maybe, someone listens. Anyone might be listening up there, and that’s more comfort than anything you could ever find in a church. And so: you talk. Say something; everything. Say anything you need to say to survive.

Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?

What he said.

Filed Under: Myself When I'm Real Tagged With: Czeslaw Milosz, Mozart, Please Talk About Me When I'm Gone, Ralph Ellison

Wishing For Eternity So Dick Cheney Could Spend It In Disgrace

March 15, 2013 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

I’m not sure what it says about me, but I’ve gone on record declaring, at times, a fervent wish that there was a God.

Because if there was a God, there might be something, somewhere, approximating what we imagine Heaven to be. And if so, the existence of Hell would be unnecessary and irrelevant, because God could choose to exclude whomever She wanted, and by default, those denied entrance would spend eternity in a dark, cold place with nothing but memories of their misdeeds to neither console nor distract them.

To be clear: I yearn to see the Evil punished more than I hope to see Good rewarded.

(Because in my vision, just about everyone can or should get into heaven. Even the murderers and rapists, who demonstrate some measure of penance or remorse. Or else, after prison or the simple passage of time, they come to understand the error of their actions. And, while some sins are unforgivable and some acts unimaginable, there is usually a greater injustice at the root of all senseless activity, including extreme violence and depravity. Concerning those who lead lives of crime, who are we –as well-fed and educated citizens– to declare Right and Wrong in any philosophical sense? In short, I don’t fancy being Judge and Jury to anyone’s eternal soul, or to act as some divine arbiter of forgiveness and forgetting. That, after all, is God’s job. Which is why we invented Him.)

But I do reserve the right to wish, ardently, for something quite biblical in its simplicity and perfection. I wish that the rare individuals who do unto others what none could do unto them (i.e., the powerful), and express nothing close to regret and can’t bring themselves to feign a gesture of introspection, face at long last, a power that humbles them in a permanent fashion. For those who are typically given the most and therefore expect more and commission the greatest ill against their fellow citizens, I possess indignation and disdain that yearns for an Ecclesiastic Imperative.

On my rather long list of most despicable people to pollute the planet during my lifetime, Dick Cheney goes straight to the top, no one particularly close to second place. In terms of rapacity combined with cowardice (nothing quite like a chicken hawk who actively avoided battle, blithely sending young soldiers to die and okaying the obliteration of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians; nothing like being in bed with Big Oil and profiting from policies that devastate the environment; nothing like being head of the company that wins the sole right to “rebuild” the infrastructure you did the most to help destroy, etc.) it’s difficult to imagine an American who has done greater harm while getting his pale bloated paws over as much filthy lucre as he could count.

I have, unfortunately, had the opportunity to depict my disdain for the man on multiple occasions. For a refresher course of redundancy, go HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, and especially HERE and HERE.

The new documentary about you-know-who has prompted some appropriately bilious comments from the commentariat. Tom Carson’s piece (from GQ) is almost too brilliant to be believed, and I’m tempted to quote from it at length, but I urge anyone to check it out in its entirety, HERE. (This piece at Salon, by Andrew O’Hehir, is also excellent.)

A few nuggets:

One thing Francis Ford Coppola didn’t understand—or anyhow, sufficiently probe—in Apocalypse Now is that our Colonel Kurtzes always start out thinking they’re Martin Sheen.

I doubt Cheney has browsed much in the Bard’s collected works. He’s a man of wealth, but no taste. Among its many other flaws, our invasion of Iraq was in poor taste. So were Abu Ghraib and waterboarding, at least if the U.S. Constitution is to your taste. But after watching The World According to Dick Cheney, I’m convinced—and I wasn’t before—that Cheney is sincere in thinking he only did the necessary. He will never understand that this country’s beauty has a lot to do with how much of what it’s all about is unnecessary.

People like me do not want to feel intimate with him. The achievement of The World According to Dick Cheneyis that we sometimes do—despite the fact that he rode a tank and held the Vice President’s rank, when “Mission Accomplished” raged and the bodies stank. Jesus, could probably tell you that it’s an old question: How do you hate someone you feel sorry for?

What he said. Only more so.

Don’t hate the player, they say. Hate the game.

Well I do hate the game. But I also reserve the right to despise. And crave the prospect of comeuppance for the players who bulldozed this world like it was their personal playpen. For the cretins who laughed at the carnage they caused. Because they could. Because no one down here could stop them.

Is there someone out there, somewhere, who can ensure there is some type of reckoning?

It’s almost enough to make you pray.