Billionaires Want to Eat Your Lunch

If you are not a billionaire, a member of the super-rich, an international kleptocrat, or money-laundering Russian oligarch, and you still support Trump, his handlers, and his greedy policies, you are either deluded, in great denial, blind, brain-washed, or reality impaired. Billionaires don't really care about you or your family or your neighborhood. Your interests are not their interests, but they will make you think that you might be one of them, someday, and they will hold out that carrot to distract you, keep you from seeing their true intentions. They will glad-hand and hobnob with you if you flatter their conceits, kow-tow to their beliefs, stick up for them, bully their opponents. Trump and his agents of corporate greed are robbing you of your birth-rights of natural resources, health care, retirement, education, protection from poisons, and opportunity to build a life. As we speak, they roll back protections of water, air, land, and sea. They will destroy the places you fish, hunt, camp, hike, or do anything in the natural world. They will dismantle and pulverize every democratic check on their power. They will watch your every move and track you down in order to sell you all that you don't really need. They have and will trail in the dust every rose of founding father freedom. It matters to them that they gain complete control of the only thing standing in their way: government. They will tell that gull dang big gummint is the problem. They are running us off a cliff into climate disruptions that will touch every aspect of your life: money, health, peace of mind, hope; they are preparing us for a state of constant war, ignorance, and distraction from what really matters. They create a worldview so narrow that you can't imagine anything beyond the thin gruel of possibility that they deem safe. Yes, it is that bad. The billionaire world-view will stop at nothing to perpetuate itself, and as it consumes more and more it eventually comes for you and yours. It thrives on division and pits those who should be allies against each other. It is insatiable, can never get enough, lives like a cancer cell, and only your actions can change its course. It's time to join together and act as if your life depends on it, as if a hungry dragon is closing in on you. The billionaires and their goons will stop at nothing less than snatching the sandwich out of your hands while rifling through your pockets for your last dime. But hey, why worry? That video game is waiting and the TV tells you they have your best interests in mind, so let them figure it out. Let them make all the decisions. The only thing they worry about is that you might wake up, see through the veil, stand up, talk back, and step up to the plate.  

The Page With His Name on It

It was that day, the one he looked back on it all. From the luxury of age, distance, and a broken heart, the angry, frustrated, misunderstood music he had lived by went mute. It didn't matter anymore. He saw what had been for the dream it was. Instead, he was grateful for the life he had lived. Simple as that. And the moment took on the pleasing distance of a drama he watched as a spectator. He saw himself there, riding off into the sunset he had made for himself, his desires fulfilled in way that he had failed to imagine and to appreciate -- or even see -- before. It was the page in the book that pointed to his work. The page, the entire page, held him in its embrace. He felt seen and heard and acknowledged. That was what he had been waiting for, though he did not know it at the time. Snapped to attention, weak in the knees, feeling a bit the fool for being so blind, he was free at last.

Fragments

The pieces wait to join each other in the magic of completeness. Separate, they are nice baubles, but together.... oh, together, my friend, they throw sparks of wild energy that grows and grows. Too much of one, and you get solipsism -- stuff, nouns, ideas -- that just sits there. Too much of the other, and all you have is action -- empty-headed car chases, wild leaps, extreme x-things with no reason or sense. It is in the union of being and action that the story begins, that the sentence begins to breathe. Character and action: that's the ticket, the creative tension between unlike, but hungry-to-join diversities. Do-be Do-be doo.