Burb's Buck & Buntline Inn

Fall Free-fall...

2025-10-28T14:05:00.005-06:00

Leaves, leave, leaves… big ones, small ones, oak, elm, birch, and my beloved maple falling...

I bike fast towards Maple Grove School. I can bike there on my own. I’m a big kid now.

Today is a big day, maybe the biggest of them all. Today, enough leaves have fallen, so it’s pile jumping day in the schoolyard.

My friends and I have been patiently watching the yellow, amber, and sienna-colored leaves fall, waiting for when the time was ripe. By the fourth grade, we are experts at knowing how many have to lay on the ground to create the perfect-sized cushy piles, whether jumped upon by graceful somersault or full-on belly flop.

Crunchy bits, twigs, and even ladybugs get stuck in our tartan jackets and dungarees and woolen hats. Adults care. The great thing about being a kid, we don’t care one leafy bit.

We eyeball the classroom clock. Morning recess — an unbearable tick-tock away.

The bell rings! Fifteen minutes of hard graft where we madly pile up the leaves under a row of giant maples, readying all for the lunch hour free-falling fun.

“Hurry! Hurry! Gather those over there! Pile them all!” We shout to one another. Our cheeks and noses a rosy red in the nippy air.

Another watched clock. This time, it's for the full free hour at lunch. We tap pencils, shuffle feet, and barely focus on our schoolwork. There are more important things in life than memorizing times tables and crayon-coloring hibernating bears and nut-gathering squirrels.

Bell chimes. Whee! We are free!

Coats and hats fly in the cloakroom. Some of us don’t even bother to dress, dragging our cold-weather gear to the leafy piles as we run.

I run, too, my toque finally plunked on my head. I look up at the eastern sky. Clouds, low-lying, slowly swirling. It looks like what my mom calls a “snow sky.”

I shovel that chilly idea from my mind and run, run, run so fast, aiming for the biggest leaf pile of them all, as big as an adult is tall! One, two, three giant steps. A rocket high jump.

“Whee!” I cry, a toothy smile dons.

Thump! Crunch! Into Mother Nature’s crispy plates, I land.

Over and over, we laugh, we scream. Half-eaten sandwiches, quick gulps from carton milk. We run and jump and squeal all noon hour long.

The bell once again. This one not wanted. Our gleeful faces melt into frowns. Begrudgingly, we gather our coats and hats and lunch boxes and trundle in.

Fall is the best time of year for an Ontario kid… until a snow sky opens up and Mother Nature drops a different kind of fun — icy white, sparkling doily piles for our romping fun.

On Being Jack the Ripper...

2025-08-26T09:54:00.002-06:00

It’s one thing as a novelist to pen a diabolical character out of whole cloth and type their destruction with abandon.

It’s another thing altogether to create fiction using a real killer who has mutilated real people.

I’m finding this out the hard way.

Enter Yours Truly, palling around with 1888 London’s Jack the Ripper.

It’s not as easy as one might think.

To begin, I shall describe my vision of serial killers. Instead of blood flowing through their veins, they have black ink. In other words, their entire makeup is so dark, so different from those of us who have a conscience, they might as well be from a different planet.

Yet, they look like us; they talk like us. Often, they can be charming, good-looking, great conversationalists, and above all street smart if not academically so.

The only telltale sign I’ve uncovered through my research is their need to keep moving — changing jobs, changing homes, changing partners, etc. They are always on the move. Not out of legal necessity, although that can be a factor. More so from a need not to think. Their torture cell is their own mind, and the quietness, stillness to think. And as predators are, their waking hours are spent targeting their next prey.

Such is the state I find with Jack.

That, and one thing far more dangerous. Like a viper, I never know when Jack will strike. I know, if and when he does, his prey stands little chance of survival.

Writing this book, I, Jack–My Interview with Jack the Ripper, has been so difficult. I will venture to say, this is the most difficult book I’ve written to date.

To be “there” when I’m playing him, it has to be a cerebral flip.

To be “there” at the Unfortunate murder scenes is such an experience I can only describe as adopting a multiple personality — Jack, calm, relishing it all, and me, the core opposite, becoming physically sick.

And coming in and out of those two states, kill scene after kill scene, takes its toll.

My responsibilities.

· To get the facts, details right. Ripper researchers will tear me a new one if I don’t.

· To portray Jack as he would have been, as close as one sentient being can.

· To portray the victims not as such, but as women in their own right, all with value.

· To portray myself, the one who meets with and interviews Jack.

You would assume the latter to be the easiest part of this work, when it can be the hardest part indeed. The need to investigate, question, debate, and yes, to argue with this killer of women. To find a meeting of minds, one century to another. Beyond the murders, we two are cultural chasms apart. Mutual understanding has to be found, and serial killers aren’t well disposed to empathy.

And the emotional and physical reaction to the scenes. The delving into and close examination of said. The forcing myself to really look and listen and yes, to smell. Sometimes I have to get up from the keyboard and escape outside to shake off the mind visuals and body shock.

And although I’ve always been a visual writer, a writer who can jump into another’s skin, writing about Jack I will literally feel cold, and I’m writing this manuscript in the heat of summer. To recover, to repair my soul, I’ll hit my deck and lay in the sun to warm up. I have never before experienced that level of realism.

Jack takes his pound of flesh. The cost is there.

As much as I’d like to race through and finish this manuscript, I can’t. There are too many details, too many nuances, sensory cues. To rush would be to do no justice to this history. I’d produce a farce with caricatures, not people. A slap in the face to all who during the Autumn of Terror suffered under this dreadful man.

And then there’s the heartache. The terrible, gut-wrenching, sorrowful heartache.

And the author guilt I suffer for dredging up, yet again, these women’s final ends.

But art finds the artist, doesn’t it? Something calls, and the creator responds. And nothing will quiet those whispers until the piece is done. The artist, a slave to the bitter end.

I’m close to 2/3rds finished with the draft. You’d think by now I’d have the process in the bag. But I don’t. It gets harder with each typed word. The emotions so heavy to bear.

I know the end will come, and I, the Unfortunates, and yes, Jack, will again be free.

I’m uncertain how I’ll feel when I type The End. Usually, I feel quietly satisfied. With I, Jack, I fear it will be a grieving process, the hurt taking some time to heal.

Being a novelist is not easy. Every civilian paints the métier in such romantic tones. If they only knew. Sleepless nights, constant note taking, checking facts, rechecking, and the deep, scar-making, sympathetic pain if you write on the dead. Real people with real lives cut far too short by the likes of predators like Jack.

I’ll end this post now. I hear Jack grumbling. He’s a moody cuss when I show up late.

Titanic Honor & Glory & Me...

2025-05-27T13:19:00.003-06:00

A few weeks ago, I came upon a video.

A restoration of the Titanic from the people at Honor & Glory Project 401.

The video is over three hours long, so I watched portions before bed. The music was soothing. The experience gave me a restful feeling before I slept.

I traveled the passages, looked into the 1^st, 2^nd, steerage, and engine rooms, and where the service attendants and crew ate and slept and lived.

It was a wonderful feeling to see into the great ship far more than anyone ever had before.

Honor & Glory, Project 401

Her well-appointed rooms, the artwork, the tapestries, the fine linens and upholstery, and the breath-taking woodwork, all of which one wonders could ever be crafted today. And if it could, what untold millions it would take to do so.

But after a few viewings, another mood struck. That of profound sadness and even claustrophobia. The latter not in the true sense. In the sense, I was the only human on this great ship. And no matter how much looked into rooms or along the promenade decks or in the lounges, no one was there. The ship was deadly silent as unto a grave. A grave I will walking through. A grave I wasn’t sure I was meant to be.

Tears came. I fought them back. How silly to cry over a video.

But my loneliness remained, and the emotions hung heavy on my shoulders like dead weight, like they would make my psyche sink into the same black abyss.

Don’t get me wrong. The people at Honor & Glory have made a visual miracle here. A once in a lifetime chance to be aboard a ship that would never be again. That if all had gone to plan, Titanic maybe in existence today as a boutique excursion like the Orient Express.

Honor & Glory, Project 401

But loss and death overwhelm. I feel panic and pain in those shiny marble halls. I sense loneliness and thirst from the vines and potted palms. I see the lacquered walls and the brilliant lighting, which shed not light but tears. The ship is crying through her rusticles pain.

Somewhere in my video travels, reality hits. I don’t know when. I don’t know where. But as mighty and ripping as a berg into iron. It hits and tears and screeches and ever damages.

All that was organic is long gone — the wood carvings, the wicker and upholstery, the linens and towels and ornate rugs. All gone. Long eaten by the ocean’s micro-organisms. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. All the is created by man is swept away by God.

Yes, inorganic materials will still exist deep within her holds. Like priceless jewels held in the ships’ safe, like the wrought iron and steel and brass and gold. But even time and sea water exposure are aging the ageless. What Honor & Glory shows us is no more. What is left is only our imaginings of a time and place when humans assumed they had tamed Mother Nature and, due to that errant belief, rode high and mighty, and fell and failed.

Yes, there were other great losses of life on the sea well before Titanic set sail. But it was man’s arrogant belief that took sail in Titanic into the unforgiving waves that summarily drowned our hopes and dreams on that clear and frigid night when the sea was as glass. The calm before God’s storm.

This was the first, but not the last, time man would live in hubris before a deadly fall and shun that Mother Nature, not man, stands watch at life’s helm.

I have yet to finish the video. I had to take a break. The emotions, too omnipresent, too overwhelming, too heavy on the lungs to catch my breath, as if I, too, were thrashing, sinking, drowning in the icy sea. But from sorrow and loss and grief and regret, and a wish of what could have been.

In the end, I need people on that ship to feel okay. I need women and mean and children, laughing and talking. The swishing of great gown trains, the clinking of crystal and the glint of solid silver service.

Honor & Glory, Project 401

I need lively chatter from the First-Class Lounge and cigar smoke haze in the Smoking Room. I need the crew and service people laughing and joking and telling tall tales over their modest meals in the ship’s bowels’ Mess. I need the Titanic’s doctor going over files and the bridge crew giving and obeying orders. I need the White Star flag flapping in a gentle breeze. I need little boys and girls running up and down the Poop Deck, playing ball and skipping rope. I need old men and women lounging in the deck chairs, gazing out to sea and thinking back into their pasts over Darjeeling and freshly baked scones.

eBay

I need so much from Titanic I shall never receive, no matter the wondrous and victorious attempt by the staff at Honor & Glory. I am one human among countless who still want more. Human evolution is a slow battle won.

I wholeheartedly encourage you to watch the Honor & Glory video on YouTube and look up their website, and even donate to their efforts. It’s a world, thanks to their amazing graphic artists, in which we can truly have a look-in and see and feel and miss as if it were our own.

But steel your emotions. Don’t let them be ripped apart like the rivets in Titanic’s hull. The weaknesses are still there, the damage still possible. It will be man, who, as always, will remember and bear the burden of regret.

sebbyvision, TikTok

The Emotional Cost on Writing About Jack…

2025-04-29T14:01:00.002-06:00

Jack the Ripper's Bedroom (c. 1907). Oil on canvas, Walter Sickert, Manchester City Gallery.

The Ripper, I mean.

It’s my turn, among countless writers before me, who have taken a crack at the man that struck terror in London’s East End for ten weeks in 1888.

Every angle, every facet, has been examined and penned, fiction and non-fiction.

So, the question remains. Why me? What can I offer that others have not?

My meeting face-to-face with the knife-wielding serial killer.

That might make a change.

Yes, I’m taking a virtual plane, and flying over to London to interview Jack. He and I will share a pint or two or three with gut rot gin shots, talking over his old times. He will take me on a tour of the murder sites, replay his methods in madness, and confess his reasons why.

Me alone with Jack, who is now a feeble old man. Oddly enough, God granted him a long life.

The obstacle — there’s always at least one in every hard-won tale — is how to survive the meeting? I’m talking surviving emotionally, psychologically, when what I’ll be facing is pure evil, black ink not blood running through the man’s veins.

My book, entitled, “I, Jack–My Interview with Jack the Ripper is already a quarter down on the page. The initial scenes, I envisioned early on. They were fairly easy to pen. It was just me in the iconic East End pub, the Ten Bells, sitting opposite a wizened-up septuagenarian, asking questions all of us have wanted answers to for some 137 years.

But when it was time for Jack to take me back to the Autumn of Terror ’88, and have me witness his first kill — seeing, hearing, smelling, and those vicious, frenzied stabs — well, that was a thing apart. A living nightmare no one, not even a curious wordsmith, should endure.

Penning the scene Jack laid out before me, I started to lose pieces of my humanity. My soul was ripped up the center, like the torsos of Jack’s innocent victims.

Yet, I know there are scenes which must be in the book, for at heart only the raw truth matters in moments like this. But even I, who has never avoided writing about death, have left blank spots on the page where that truth must stand, for I have yet to find the courage to pen what I see in my mind’s eye.

In essence, I, Jack is a morality tale. How in satisfying one’s curiosity about evil, a human can murder their soul.

The book must reveal the true horror of what occurred on those grimy streets in the wee hours of the night. Where the cold and the damp and the wretched decay will penetrate you well before Jack’s knife does.

In the end, Jack’s tale is timeless. Abusive acts born out of abuse. In Jack’s backstory, physical and emotional terror existed. And as so with most serial killers, the abused go on to abuse, maiming and hurting in far greater ways to avenge their deadened souls.

And through it all, there will be only me facing Jack. A single female traveller headed across The Pond to witness and record what no one ever should.

v The length and width of Jack’s blade.

v The depth and number of pockets in his pea coat.

v The scary strength still remaining in his age-spotted, gnarled hands.

v The smells, the sounds, the slimy grime which invades the nostrils and will not let go.

v And the blood. God help me. All the blood.

But to recreate one must relive. A writer has no escape from the naked truth, as there was none for those poor Unfortunates in Jack’s deadly grasp.

I pound the keyboard.

I flip my scene cards.

In a kind of self-preservation, desperation, I all too quickly bang out the words.

So, I can flee what I’m experiencing.

The result is no good, of course. I must return. I must properly flesh out the draft. I must force myself to stay put in those ghastly scenes, to view longer, experience more, to describe better.

The process makes me sick.

A kind of sour taste overtakes my mouth. My stomach churns. My need to rocket off this chair and go and do anything but pen this awful tale…

But that’s not how Jack wants it. And that’s not how this tale gets told.

I intend to publish I, Jack sometime in the autumn — the Autumn of Terror. I didn’t plan the synchronicity. It’s just how this writer’s experience has unfolded. Fate is a funny thing.

I said after penning my first serial killer book I’d never write on serial killers again. It takes too much of an emotional toll. Yet here I am because Jack called my name. And like an idiot, I answered the call to sit across from the being whose hands never leave his cane and whose eyes never leave mine.

Crikey, I really need my head examined. I really do. To assuage my lunacy, I think, What can possibly happen? Yes, indeed, what possibly can?

Have you ever wanted to sit down with Jack the Ripper, and have him tell you, show you, all?

Dear reader, be careful what you wish for. You might just get it and not survive The End.

~~~

I, Jack will drop in the Fall of 2025. I hope I’m sane enough then to enjoy the launch.

Blow by Blow – A Writer’s Process Through the Manson Family Murders

2025-02-16T13:49:00.001-07:00

56 years.

Yes, 56 years since the Manson Family slaughtered ten innocent lives.

In 1978, the Manson Family killers came up for parole. I remember being glued to the news. I lived some 1500 miles away from the killers, and in Canada, but I remember being swallowed up by the fear those monsters would be set free. When they were thankfully denied parole, I began researching the Family and the crimes in earnest and have continued to this day.

The fear in me had started so long ago, the morning after the massacre at 10050 Cielo Drive. It was all over the news, ground and aerial shots, reporters gathering outside the gate. Southern California, really the world, was stunned by the details that were coming out of that property way up in Benedict Canyon, where the Beautiful People lived.

I was only 5 years old at the time but had my father’s photographic memory and a raging imagination. Nothing escaped me on those subsequent days. The live on-site reporting, the newspaper photos of the dead, and the adult conversations swirling around me, whispered, of course. Those adults tried their best to shield me from the fear. But a child can feel fear in others. There was nowhere for anyone to hide. And in my little girl imagination I was positive Charlie and Sadie were coming for me, too.

As of August 9, 1969, my little world outlook was never the same. But no one’s outlook was.

We had gone from innocent, carefree days, where no one gave a thought to locked doors or hiding behind imposing gates. The 60s had been daisy chain love. Overnight, my generation swam in a blood bath. The open, loving world had shut down, never to open again.

While others penned the umpteen books that are out there on this case, I kept mum. I grew up. I watched and listened and read and quietly researched through the years.

It wasn’t until the internet fired up that more information could be gleaned by the public, and more learned about the case. In 2008, I attempted to join an online group to discuss the murders. Most groups out there were pro-Charlie, pro-Family. When they discovered I had law enforcement familial ties, I was kicked out of their binary enclaves.

Being rejected has never stopped me, especially by those who are or favor the outlaw life. Rather, it makes me smile and eggs me on, as like it did my father, an RCMP — Royal Canadian Mounted Police — Constable. Outlaws say, “Don’t come in, don’t look here,” and by God, that’s precisely what I and my father would do. The old saying, keep your friends close and your enemies closer, so applies in this case. Back in ‘68/69, if my father had worked for LASO — Los Angeles Sheriff Office — and worked Charlie’s patch at Spahn, he would have stuck to old Charlie and his spaced-out kids like white on rice, observing every action that group would take to have Manson void his parole and go back to where he belonged. Prison.

And so, in a binary sense, I chose to do the same. I created the 2nd Official Tate-LaBianca Murders Blog — the 1st being a pro-Charlie blog, aligned with those who kicked me to the curb. Yes, my chosen blog title was an online jab. Youbetcha. It would have made my father smile.

TLB2, as it’s known, has always been free. No subscriptions, no fees, no profit at all. It would be my take on what truly happened, by whom, to whom, when, and why, as laid out in firsthand police statements, witness testimonies, lie detector tests, LAPD and LASO case documents, and trial transcripts. You know, those niggling facts that get in the way of an agenda-driven website or a bestselling Tell-All chock-a-block with hype, innuendo, and falsehoods.

So, I investigated and typed my way through TLB2. 300+ posts now reside there. Besides the forensic posts, I wrote on the culture and the times, adding a few fictional works, to give the blog a 360-degree Technicolor feel.

And I watched as others published more books. Some very well done. Many lousy.

People who knew me and knew my vast knowledge in the case always asked, “Why don’t you write a book?” I was asked that for years.

My answer up ’til now had always been, “That would put blood on my hands.” And I meant it. Somehow, I couldn’t mesh the fear I had felt as that little girl, the panic that cloaked my generation in those heart-stopping days, the devastating hurt of the surviving family members, and me writing a book for money.

Years passed. Many. Other than the blog, I kept mum.

And last year, on the 55th anniversary, something in me changed.

I don’t know if the dead nodded their heads in approval or it was me needing to turn the page on my experience. To close the book on my own fear, as it were, and in so doing, offer my final words on the case.

It was as if the time was now, the time was right. The blood, if any, would be ever so slight on my hands, a half century later. I could craft a record on what went down. To fill in the gaps, to answer some questions, to have the last word as my generation ages and passes on the wind.

And so, Blow by Blow — The Manson Family Murders & In-Depth Examinations was born.

Blow by Blow is a re-creation of those terror-filled nights. I fill in the gaps based on learned facts in the case, adding creative license where no information was offered by the killers, in terms of dialogue or actions. It’s set up as a projector of sorts, where the reader isn’t just told about the cases, but re-lives them. To feel the fear, we alive back then felt.

In the second half of the book, The Examinations, I take certain aspects of the crimes and dissect them in their minutia, attempting to offer answers to questions we as outsiders have always had.

Boiled down, Blow by Blow is my book on closing the book on these crimes.

~~~

Time has passed. 56 years is a long time.

There have been people who have been born, lived, died, in that time.

Today on the whole, Manson and his Family are considered by the younger generations to be freaks from the Hippie era, and little more. A blip, a tear in society’s fabric, long since mended.

And maybe they’re right. But those were who were alive back then and felt the fear, lived through the panic that any hippie could be a Charles Manson knife-wielding Slippie… well, it’s a psychic tear that leaves a scar.

In crafting Blow by Blow, I wandered down Memory Lane and Google mapped the principal locales to see how time has shaped them. It turns out, the Present has done a pretty good job at burying the Past.

Barker Ranch — (top) Recondito, (bottom) Craig Baker

Barker Ranch — As most know, the ranch house is now a ruin, thanks to a suspicious fire in 2009. Charlie’s bus was towed out decades ago. The land has been allowed to return to its natural state, shooing evil ghosts with those final flames.

Spahn Ranch (top) Ralph Crane/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images, (bottom) Google Maps 2025

Spahn Ranch — Today from Santa Susanna Pass Road, you can’t see into the land which once held those dilapidated movie sets. Scrub bushes have grown monstrous in the half-century, whether via Mother Nature or egged on by a nearby church who owns the property. It’s anyone’s guess.

3301 Waverly Drive (top) Bettmann/Bettmann Archive, (bottom) Google Maps 2025

3301 Waverly Drive, the LaBianca Home — New owners, I believe at least twice removed, have done their level best to hide the house from photograph seekers, videographers, and tourist gawkers. Who can blame them? The only things left are the lantern pedestals on either side of the drive to let you know you’re standing where blood once flowed.

10050 Cielo Drive (l) CBS Newscast 1969, (r) Google Maps 2025

And 10050 Cielo Drive — the Tate Home — Talk about a Hollywoodesque facelift surgically applied to this property. About the only real object left is the telephone pole I’ve circled in red, the one Tex Watson climbed to cut the four wires on that fateful night.

On purpose, by accident, or by Mother Nature knowing best, the Manson Family murder stains — those awful moments in those unfortunate locales — are disappearing from view. That generation, my generation, is slowly disappearing, too, as all generations do.

In publishing Blow by Blow, I feel like I’m the last one to turn out the lights and lock the doors on this chapter in man’s inhumanity to man. Maybe it’s fitting. I was born in 1964, the last year of the Baby Boomer gen. Maybe the last one in is the last one out.

And maybe those of us who were alive and lived through those earth-shattering times need to close the book and move on.

It’s funny. I can replay the 1973 documentary, Manson, produced by Robert Hendrickson and Lawrence Merrick, and feel the fear I felt then, rocketing back as visceral and suffocating as it was all those years ago. Some hurts, some trauma, I guess, never truly die.

Charles Manson and his Family were North America’s first domestic terrorists. With their human slaughter of innocents, they crossed a line, one from which society could never return. With Buntline, bayonet, and Buck knife wounds, the damage went deep. Physical to those ten poor souls, psychological to the rest of us. As a pebble smacks water, as ripples roll to shore, so did those murders hit all of us. The daisy chain generation was forced into holding dead blooms.

Below is a street corner shot of LA’s Hall of Justice, where the Manson Family trials took place. Every day during the trials, devoted Family members would sit vigil at the corner of West Temple and North Broadway, singing, praising, and defending Manson and the killers.

By 1972, most of Charlie’s members had ebbed away. After the guilty verdicts and the death penalties given to the killers, most of Charlie’s lost kids figured out Manson and the Family had never been about love, and they slowly walked away, licking their psychic wounds.

Hall of Justice, Temple & Broadway (top) Sandra, Lynette, Manson movie clip (1973), (bottom) same pedestal today, Google Maps 2025

All but Charlie’s two most devoted girls, Sandra Good, aka Blue, aka Blue Collins and Lynette Fromme, aka Red, aka Squeaky.

From 1969 to today, those two refuse to admit they got lost and devoted themselves to a killing machine. I assume they cannot admit said, for their psyches would crumble if they did. They had invested all of themselves into Charlie. Without him and his ideology, they were dust to the wind. It’s through Lynette and Sandra and that street corner I sense a residual haunting, felt by those of us who remember and know where to look.

Today, that pedestal outside the Hall of Justice remains, but doubtful most who walk by it now know its significance. Or if they do, they no longer care.

To me, evil still hovers there, as it lingers ever so slightly at the locales. I would not want to touch or sit on that pedestal or sit on the sidewalk where the Family members camped. Or walk along Waverly Drive and touch the LaBianca lantern pedestals or touch the Cielo Drive telephone pole, or tread on the sand and sagebrush up at Barker or through the scrub and and boulders at Spahn. Some things are better left undisturbed.

Lynette, Sandra (top) Manson movie clip (1973), (bottom) (l) Lynette Briefly News, (r) Sandra Boston Globe

As of this writing, Lynette supposedly lives in New York State. Sandra’s whereabouts are unknown, somewhere along the eastern seaboard or in the Midwest. Wherever those to may breathe air, they are thousands of miles away from the carnage they still defend. Ill assume they planned it that way.

For me, for others like me, who lived through that carnage, some vibes are still too strong, too breath-taking, too horrific, even now.

Yes, I’ve closed the book on this part of my life by creating a book. It’s a physical object I can read and literally close its cover and shelve, never to be touched or read again.

But some things are not as easy to bury. The song Paul Watkins and Brooks Poston sing in the movie Manson 1973 (Watkins and Poston, former Family members, never hurt or killed anyone, and escaped in time) still rings in my ears. Maybe it was a love song to them. But to me, it’s a haunting melody that re-ignites the fear. The fear never dies. It merely lays dormant in me.

The daisy was the icon of the 60s, representing love, purity, and joy. Daisy chains were our crowns.

Until the summer of ’69.

Then the daisies died.

And dead things you cannot bring back to life no matter how you try.

~~~

Blow by Blow, by BJ Thompson.

Available at Amazon, e-book and paperback.

Thompson Girl...

2024-12-30T13:16:00.006-07:00

Thompson Girl, my writers mind a Psycho Motel

Thompson Girl, scenes in my head, it's hell

Looks like Christmas at 70 degrees

This forced heating isn't free, Thompson Girl

Write words mired between fact and fantasy

Freeing through edits bits of majesty

Thompson Girl from kid hood life goes downhill

Moments on Trans Canada, many a boring pill

But when I saw that Stampede hat

I yahooed loud, Cowtown yahooed back, Thompson Girl

Book work, thoughts between life and reverie

Freeing through edits, bits of majesty

Book work, words between fact and fantasy

Freeing through edits, synchronicity

Thompson Girl, weary fingers as keyboard plants

Thompson Girl, books cherished in tired hands

Winter's here, no relief is coming

There's no green to see

Words still barfing, pray for majesty

So many lives I'll write forever

Swig the booze, get it together, Thompson Girl

Thompson Girl

"It's a Defeat, But We Are Not Defeated." Why Does President Biden Sound Like Neville Chamberlain?

2024-11-07T13:47:00.013-07:00

Since midnight, November 5, 2024, I've been in the Licking My Wounds stage.

I stopped tweeting on Twitter (and no, it's not called bloody X by me) where for the last few years has been my front line in fighting Donald Trump and his fascist ways.
I removed all my U.S. political pundit channels I watched on YouTube.
I refuse to look at any American online news sites, for if I see that conman's face one more time I will not be responsible for my brain aneurysm.
I made one final Twitter post pic before I signed off from all political tweets.

And then I fell silent as the grave I fear America has dug for itself, dragging the rest of us into its abyssal realm.

President Biden spoke today, trying to bolster up Americans and the world. Joe is a great guy, a real humanitarian, but today all I saw at that podium was Neville Chamberlain waving a flimsy paper proving war with Hitler was averted, September 30, 1938, some 336 days, under a year, from the start of World War II, and approximately 85 million lives lost, 3% of the world's population at that time.

Fascists, dictators, they don't play by the rules. Neville Chamberlain found that out. Winston Churchill had the almighty task of fixing Neville's bleeding heart approach to a mad man.

Sadly, Americans, bless their hearts, are not the wisest apples in the apple barrel. They have the greatest military the world has ever known. But knowledge in political history, not so much. Three things continue to dominate that country:

They vote with their wallet.
They are inherently racist.
And those who are NOT racist, can't get off their fat asses in great enough numbers to vote racism and greed away.

Am I pissed? Did I scream into the wind? Did I warn my American followers?

"Donald Trump IS America's Hitler!"

"Covid job shut-downs created world-wide inflation, not the bloody Dems!"

"Don't be afraid of Others. Be afraid of your uneducated, narrow-minded neighbors, who out of lack of job re-education blame their financial struggles on everyone but themselves!"

I posted, retweeted, day after day. As one lowly Canadian, I worked harder than most Americans crying warnings into the wind.

But the very worst has happened. There will be a second Trump Administration.

And if I were an anti-Trump political pundit, a PoC (Person of Color), a Dreamer, or an undocumented alien, I would be packing my carpet bags and leaving Dodge on the next flight out.

Unlike Neville Chamberlain's 336 days, Americans have only 74 until Trump bulldozes his way into the Oval Office, to wreak social, Geo-political, economic, health-related, and racial havoc.

Muslim country flight bans. Again.
Dreamer, illegal alien, PoC round ups, encampments.
Imprison his enemies - from former Joint Chiefs to political opponents, to God knows who.
Pull licenses from anti-Trump TV channels, making FOX a 24-7 state-fun propaganda feed.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health Czar - fluoride gone, zero vaccines cause public health crisis.
Sundown Medicaid/Medicare - causing senior/disabled to become penniless.
Police violence against PoC - silent immunity from the Trump Administration.
Weaponizing the Department of Justice against his enemies.
Weaponizing the Internal Revenue Service against his enemies.
Eradicate Child Labor laws.
Eradicate Retirement Age.
Sharing Top Secret intel of NATO countries to our enemies - Russia, China, North Korea, Iran
Wide-reaching Product Import Tariffs - cause U.S. Depression, global inflation spike.
Russia given Green Light to retake Ukraine
China given Green Light to invade Taiwan
North Korea given Green Light to invade the South
Netanyahu to bulldoze Gaza and racially cleanse Israel of all Palestinians.
Iranians fighting for democracy executed with Trump easily looking the other way.
Trump's criminal trials erased. Hush Money sentencing a mere fine.

And that's me merely riffing off the top of my head.

Could Trump be more bark than bite? Sure, I guess.

But when he asked General Milley in 2020 why the military couldn't shoot the Washington DC Lafayette Square rioters in the knees, I doubt Trump was kidding.

And this time, there will be no one in the Trump Administration No. 2 who will say No.

So my gut: This time, far more bite than bark from the mad man.

I won't lie. I am scared. Scared for humanity. Scared for us all. So, I cannot imagine those Americans who are in Trump's gun sights. In these 74 days, I'd be selling everything I owned and leaving the U.S, begging any other democratic country for political asylum status.

On February 20, 1939, the German American Bund party rally at Madison Square Garden turned out to be all bark and no bite. But this time, MAGA paved the way to a second Trump term.

And will Trump eradicate the POTUS term limit? My guess is he'll damn well try. And with the MAGA sect bolstered in the Republican party, what state wouldn't ratify that Constitutional change?

I could go on and on and on, but what's the point.

Most of my Canadian countrymen and women are quietly disgusted, but shrugging their shoulders, silently praying the MAGA Blitzkrieg flames don't fan up here. With Liberal Party Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the helm, we have a chance. God help Canada if an extreme right winger becomes our leader.

So, instead of editing my 7th novel, I am here today, typing away, crying one final time into the wind.

I know my voice is small. I hold no clout. And I rue the day when I and millions of freedom-loving, democracy-loving citizens end up saying, "I told you so." This is one debate I don't want to win.

But so fear I may.

God bless Joe Biden and may he be NOT our Neville Chamberlain.

And God bless us all.

The Five, No More - Ode to the Titan and Titanic Fallen

2023-06-23T12:42:00.002-06:00

The American Dream — A Candid Canadian Perspective...

2022-10-05T10:52:00.000-06:00

Several years ago, I took a trip to New York City for a writer’s conference, and while heading out for the evening, my Uber driver asked where I was from. I told him Canada. And as an obvious immigrant to the States himself, he said, “What’s it like there?” And I said, “Better than here.”

That confused the bejeebers out of him, forcing the driver to ask, “But don’t you want the American Dream, too?”

I simply said, “Canadians have it without the guns, the lack of healthcare, and the slavery to capitalism.”

His look: utterly confused.

I smiled.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I love America. Half of my family, on both sides, were American, and as such, that makes me a hybrid of sorts, a person who identifies more as a proud North American than merely Canadian or American, which offers me a clear perspective on both.

Ill-informed Americans think Canada is a socialist state, which is the furthest from the truth. We do, however, believe in the motto, High tides lift all boats, so we are happy to help those who are needing help. It’s our belief, and it’s held true for generations, that if all Canadians gain a solid education, have the ability to acquire a sound career, can save and purchase a house within their means, end up becoming productive members of society, paying back in taxes what was given to them, which increases our country’s coffers by far then letting the underdogs stay underdogs. In Canada, we strive for a sound middle class, not an existence of extremes — the filthy rich on one side of the proverbial tracks versus just the plain filthy on the other.

My first few trips to the U.S. stunned me as a child. You’d leave this very affluent area of mansions and manicured streets, only to cross one street over and see a broken society with tar-paper shacks and refuse and graffiti warning gangs away from other gangs.

A street back from Atlantic City, God help ya.
As you drive farther up the mountain road to the Whitefish, Montana ski hill, you literally go from tar-paper shacks to log cabin mansions.
If you get take the wrong freeway turn off in Los Angeles, it might not just be the beauty you’ll lose, it may be your life.

The U.S. is a constant maze of Yes’s and No’s, of Go Here, Stay Away from There.

I remember my first visit to Palm Springs. I was staying out at a gated community near the polo field in Indio, and one night after being in town, my late husband and I decided to go to the Ralph’s grocery store instead of Von’s, as it was closer, and we were beat. Yes, even in stores, if you don’t go to the right one in the right neighborhood, you’ll be stared right out of the place, and not in a pleasant way. The Ralph’s in Indio is frequented by the field laborers, the fruit pickers and farmworkers who come from the immigrant class. My husband and I got what we needed and got out. It wasn’t that those poor people meant us harm. Their stares held more confusion and fear, their expressions saying in silence, what were two well-off white people doing in their grocery store?

That dichotomy, that Ying and Yang of extremes, it’s just not a part of the Canadian psyche. Yes, Canadians strive for an excellent education, and solid career, a place to call home, but we don’t amass wealth at the expense of others. Every Canadian has a chance at personal success, surely, but we don’t bow to the Almighty Dollar as the only definition of that success.

Since the 2008 stock market/housing crash in the U.S., Americans are seeing the Canadian light and taking sips of the Canadian coffee. They are beginning to realize that regulation is NOT a four-letter word and that protection for the unfortunate means protection for all. But I’ve watched this show before, of disaster and righteous talk, so when it comes to Americans changing for the better, I don’t hold my breath. The complete stock market crash of ’29 very nearly happened in 2008. It might be that America chooses to live that financial roller-coaster, to chase great wealth at great risk, the unfortunate be damned, ad infinitum. Personally, when I think of America’s All or Nothing at All mindset, I look down at my Canadian passport and smile like the Mona Lisa was painted yesterday.

Is it easier as an American to become an uber-millionaire, to get a huge mortgage and a flashy car you can’t afford, and go bust as quick as you hit Boomtown? Yes. Is it a gamble most immigrants to the U.S. hunger to take on? Yes, again.

Me, I’d rather be less uber anything, obtain a mortgage I will qualify for and drive a car that’s paid for in full, so I can sleep soundly at night. Does that make me and all Canadians boring, staid, predictable? Maybe. But there’s something to be said for cheating the Bankruptcy Man.

“A Canadian Dream?” You ask. “Is there one?” Yes, each and every one of us north of the 49th live it right now, today, in so many ways.

No Dodge City at High Noon gun control gone a muck. Automatic assault rifles, handguns are banned in Canada, and most Canadians don’t own guns, and yeppers, we rest easy with that fact.
Mortgage Companies must be regulated in Canada, ensuring that no home buyer purchases a home beyond their means, eliminating any housing crash.
Universal Health Care. Yes, there are wait times for some procedures, but the care is superb, and Canadians don’t have to be worried about going bankrupt if a chronic illness or accident occurs.
A sound social welfare system that supports those in need but expects the recipients to work for those benefits in return.
A stellar education system which is nationally coordinated, so your child won’t be left behind if you move provinces.
A solid WCB, Workers Compensation Board, benefit system if you suffer a work-related illness or injury.
Low crime, clean air, clean cities, and suburban peace and quiet, thanks to our immense country and its relatively low population.

I could go on.

The Canadian Dream. Canadians don’t dream about it. We live it. And we don’t have to run over our grandmothers in cars we can’t afford to do it.

Will an American of similar background and education have a better chance to strike it uber rich over a Canadian? Probably. But moderation for Canadians insures no great financial plummet risk after that money-grabbing soar either.

I often think about that New York Uber driver… his look of utter confusion, and his fear that he may be missing out.

Citizens from around the world fantasize about immigrating to the U.S. to reach for that elusive American Dream. Canadians do not. And as we are not a people wont to toot our own horns, we quietly smile our Mona Lisa smiles as we gaze lovingly at our Canadian passports, and thankfully fly back home.

Being the Ricardo's - A Brokenhearted Love Story or a Fissure in a Patriarchal World...

2022-08-09T09:58:00.013-06:00

Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Courtesy GetArchive

Tragic love stories of memorable people who should have never parted are probably the tales which make me stop in my tracks, exude that shell shocked soldier 1000-yard stare, and have those staring eyes fill with tears for what could have been.

Of course, the Ricardo’s in I Love Lucy were a fictional couple, but in real life, in the 20th century, there were many such power couples that did their share of imploding.

Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner
Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton
Rosemary Clooney and Mel Ferrer
And, of course, and possibly the most heartbreaking of them all, the real Ricardo’s, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.

Yes, I know. This is the 21^st century. And all four couples have long since passed. But the ripples of disappointment of those great loves for those of us who grew up in the 20^th still resound with questions unanswered, and a plea — was there anything that could have been done to avoid these heartbreaks or were they collateral damage in a changing culture between men and women?

The common denominator in all these celebrated unions, it seems to me, is the matching of strong women to old-fashioned men at a time when women’s rights were on the soap box, finding their collective voice against society’s patriarchal rule.

Sure, the suffragettes began the movement towards women’s equality, but it wasn’t until the 60s that the fight truly came to roost in Mr. & Mrs. America’s homes.

Women’s demands were ruffling male feathers…

They wanted careers beyond the home.
They wanted more career options than secretary, teacher or nurse.
They wanted a say in their financial futures, obtaining a home mortgage or a car loan without a male signature.
They wanted equal pay for equal work.

And all of these demands weren’t sitting well with all men.

To reinforce their manhood, some men resorted to having love affairs with women that would adore them, would like them to be the dominant one, would let them make all the decisions.

And that left celebs like Ava, Elizabeth, Rosemary and Lucille out in the marriage cold.

Were there other circumstances which added to the domestic rupture? I’m sure there were. But Frank and Richard and Mel and Desi wanted their women subservient, pliable, yes-women, and even from where I’m sitting none of these four were anything like that. Ava, Elizabeth, Rosemary and Lucille were talented, able, and visionaries in how to formulate their own futures without a male thumb pressing down on them.

Did these four women love their men? Yes, they surely did. They tried more than once to keep their marriages intact, but the fissures — cultural, career, personal — became too great. And what these couples were left with were separations and hurts that, in my opinion, never truly healed.

On YouTube, there’s a video showing Desi and Lucille in a pool with their grandchild. This is years after their divorce, and each had other partners, but in that video, you still see the caring and the love, and as a voyeur, I feel the hurt of what could have, should have been, if only the male/female evolution could have been quicker to resolve.

Growing pain in the human experience. They are not figurative. As we humans evolve, hurt is left behind to linger. Sure, this is the 21st century and many sexual equality strides have been made, and issues that would have ruptured marriages in the 20th would not in the 21st. And that is good. That is great.

But once in a while my mind will wander back to the past, feel the lingering hurt and wonder why?

If Frank, Richard, Mel and Desi were here today, would they act differently to the loves of their lives? Maybe today that’s a moot question. Maybe all four couples, in the next ethereal world, are already back together again, love trumping all.

This is what I'd like to believe.

My Apology to Elvis…

2022-06-25T16:24:00.005-06:00

It was a sweltering summer, that summer. Heat that lays heavy on your skin and in your lungs.

It was late afternoon, if I remember right. I was home, wearing my favorite green and white striped top and short outfit. I was a lanky thirteen-year-old who hadn’t yet grown into her body. My long chestnut hair still possessed the natural wavy curls I’d had since I was a toddler.

Maybe it was a movie or a daytime show I was watching. It’s all a blur now, but what I do remember is the channel cut in for breaking news…

Elvis Presley, the King of Rock & Roll, dead, at 42

I remember leaving my chair and inching up to the TV screen, thinking that to get closer, I’d know more, digest more, maybe feel less shock, bolster my psyche for the sorrow and sadness yet to come, and maybe sitting close I could channel my thoughts to E, and ask why?

I was one human being among millions around the world who stopped what they were doing that day to sit, glued to those flickering images, to search for a why.

NBC News

Mobile cameras and helicopters filmed the growing crowd in front of the musical gates at Graceland. People crying — women, men, and even little children, who never knew E, but who saw their sorrowful parents and sensed fear. Some fainted, others gazed up into the heavens, exclaiming they could see Elvis’s face in a cloud smiling down on them. Traffic was a snarled mess along Elvis Presley Boulevard. My mind, all those many, many miles away, was a snarl, too.

But by ’77, hadn’t we all moved on from Elvis?

Weren’t kids nowadays glued to the big hair rock bands, the mega concert attractions with hard rock ’n’ rollers never as handsome, never as slick, never a southern gentleman polite? Didn’t we have bigger concerns than to keep up with an aging icon, who, like any everlasting pillar in society, had been on our TV and theater screens and concert stages since our birth? Who now was growing old before his time, gaining weight and quietly giving up?

Pillars are never supposed to collapse like so much sand and simply blow away. But Elvis did, right before my eyes, and I didn’t even hear his cry for help.

Times had changed. This was the ’70s, after all…

America lost the Vietnam War. Shunned and ridiculed vets were dying of drug and alcohol abuse, and no one cared.
JFK, MLK and RFK were, by now, long past memories.
There was inflation, and gasoline lines and crime waves, and a peanut farmer in the White House. Canada reveled in its own Trudeaumania. And the scene to be seen was now at Studio 54 with the Stones, not at Graceland with E.

Sure, there would be an Elvis article printed here or there in some magazine that needed celebrity filler. Or an unusual Elvis concert that would make the news.

CNN

This time, the mammoth Houston Astrodome. Elvis flew over the site. “Oh, my boy, oh my, boy,” Elvis would say, shaking his lowered head, the man still amazed that after all the years of stratospheric success, a poor boy from Tupelo could fill such a place.

After his umpteenth show at the International in Vegas, rock band members, now icons in their own right, would go backstage to figuratively kiss the ring of the King, genuinely thank the man who had started it all. Elvis would feed off of their youth and vitality and talent. Someday, E would tour like them, he’d tell Jerry Schilling. Someday.

Of course, someday never came. Colonel Tom Parker put paid to that. Even a beloved work horse can only get up so many times after constantly being whipped down.

I just plain didn’t know you were that work horse, E. None of us did.

Had I known, I would have paid more attention, written you a letter in my childish 13-year-old hand. I would have said, “Hang in there, Mr. P. Get help. Your life has only begun!” I’d tell you to wait, that you’d finally break free of Parker’s financial chains and fly like a bird on the wing and see and do and sing the world over. At 42, this was not the time to give up. We still needed you here.

Had we known, we could have all written letters to E.

By 1977, there were cracks in the Elvis facade, of course. The Tell-All penned by Sonny and Red West, and Dave Hebler, published only 15 days before his death, “Elvis What Happened?” But even before the book, there were whispers of drug abuse and poor health. E would check into a Memphis hospital, reporters said, for rest.

Why didn’t we ask, “Who needs to rest in their early 40s?”

How come we, his admirers, turned a blind eye to all the clues? The bloated body, the flaccid face, the sickly pale skin, and the uncontrollable sweat. Elvis had been there for us. Why were we not there for him? After all the years, why could we not see what was right in front of our eyes?

The hard truth: We didn’t care enough, did we, E? We didn’t love you enough.

We saw the train wreck coming, and not once did we yell out for you to jump. You kept singing the songs, we kept cheering you on, and the money train kept rolling in for everyone but you.

Health issues, who cares? Doesn’t every famous entertainer have their own Dr. Feel Good? You’d lose the weight again, right? You’d have a “Comeback after the Comeback” special. And like always, we’d be there to bathe in your glory, never thinking for one sec that maybe this time you needed to bathe in ours.

I am sorry, E. God damn, am I so sorry.

I saw you as that pillar in my life that would never crumble, never collapse. I plain forgot you were human, a mere mortal, just like me, with a heart and soul and feelings that could be irrevocably hurt and a body that could break.

I’m sorry I didn’t stand up, and yell to the world, “E’s hurt. E’s dying. Somebody help!”

In ’77, I’m a kid you don’t even know exists who had to leave her own father less than a year before, because he was addicted to alcohol. I was grieving then for my lost father, like Lisa Marie soon would for you. Maybe I had no room in my young heart for one more addicted father, and I plain shut you out.

But the fact remains that I let you down. We all did. What’s worse: We let others let you down. I was one of millions who saw and felt and was saddened by your disintegration, and chose to stay mum, for our addiction was you. I’m sorry for enjoying you as I did, with not one thought to repay you for your undying kindness.

I am sorry you were alone when you took your last breath, and I felt not one hair on my head move from your dying whisper.

In all these 45 years, I and millions of your fans have grown up, and although we are now much older than you were the day you died, a part of our souls stopped growing on that sweltering August day, for we still wear out your records and replay your aging concert films, you standing there, forever young, forever laughing with those smiling eyes, as our own sight now grows dim.

We have not forgotten you, Elvis, or freed ourselves from the hurt we felt that horrid summer’s day. The guilt we carry from not saving you will remain our cross to bear until it’s our time to join you in heaven.

You are long blown off this mortal coil, we know. Your past, its joys and sorrows, long since gone. Your moment on earth now but a whispered memory. But we who knew and loved you in your time, our time, carry your earthly burden, so that you may fly…

Unapologetic Talk - ID a Joke from a Jab...

2022-05-31T13:56:00.028-06:00

Time. It's elusive as the wind.

It surrounds us, but we can't grab it or nail it down.

It rules our lives, but never whispers a warning that it will soon be up.

~~~

I recently watched an old Dean Martin MGM Celebrity roast episode. On this special Christmas season night, Dean was roasting his pal of pals, Francis Albert Sinatra. I had just fought through six very sick days of Covid. I needed a laugh.

Virtually, everyone roasting Frank in Vegas that night is now dead, minus comedienne, Ruth Buzzi, and mimic, Rich Little. Dean and Frank, and their Rat Pack, are all gone.

It was one hour and 38 minutes of joy. Pure, light-hearted joy. The jokes would be silly, sassy and plain off-color, in every way. But nobody cared. Everybody felt the love, knowing this moment would never come their way again, that when the klieg lights died and the spit shine shoes hit the cold hard cement in the real world far removed from this precious time capsule, there would be time enough to feel hurt or regret or just plain human sadness. But on that dais, that night, in those few moments, there was no time for that.

No race.

No color.

No creed.

No political persuasion.

No meanness given.

No meanness received.

It was the Game of Games: I verbally kick your butt, and you kick mine, and let's see who kicks best, and in between the jokes, we drink and smoke and actually MAKE TIME to laugh... LAUGH HARD, AT OURSELVES... because time's a ticking... even if we can't see or hear the clock.

Back then, it was the art of the Comedic Thrust & Parry - heavy on the art. Few today who didn’t live through that art form appreciate the lost game. I mean, who has time for that jocular verbal jig when your emotional dance card is filled with being offended by EVERYTHING and EVERYONE, ALL THE TIME? Your life's schedule of shaming and hate is too jam-packed.

~~~

*My post INTERLUDE BEGINS. Orchestra lights ~ Picture the movie, Cleopatra. You're halfway through this soap box diatribe. Go grab some more popcorn and another soda. It's here that I'll give up a prayer to the 60s and 70s. Thank you wacky decades for filling me up with that joyous oxygen I'd need to survive these current joy-sucking times. Thank you neon blue eyeshadow and harvest gold Naugahyde and miniskirts and go-go boots and, yes, to you, the all mighty Brylcreem. Who knew I'd have to return to you to find joy? Orchestra fades ~ INTERLUDE ENDS.*

~~~

Thank God for comedienne, LaWanda Page, who knew what was what on the dais that night. She said she saw so much white skin she feared snow blindness. And if she'd have said that NOT USING the word HONKY, I, as a 4-star, card-carrying Honky, would have been mightily disappointed, in 1978 as in 2022, for I, said Honky, aka Cracker — aka whatever heck else people of color want to call people of less color to denote how people of less color can be 4-star idiots — can TAKE A BLOODY JOKE and RECOGNIZE HOW WHITES CAN BE IDIOTS.

Cogitate on that, oh hapless offended ones!

And if Peter Falk could get up and say he heard a Hoboken rumor it was actually Jerry Vale's voice singing on all Frank's records, and not get his nose punched into tomorrow by old Blue Eyes - on stage or off - all was damn fine in that world. Real damn fine.

Participants assumed that if you breathed air at one of Dean's roasts, you would be the butt of someone's jokes, and never get bruised by them.

Like it's supposed to be.

Like we all should be, all the time, roast or not, online and off.

The world is damn mean and ugly enough without adding nonexistent offense to the human conversation. Check your pearl-clutching over-sensitivity at the door there, pal. We got no time to whine.

As I scan left and right along that dais, I shiver to think how many tubes of Brylcreem sacrificed their lives for that celebrity line-up:

Peter Falk

Orson Welles

Jimmy Stewart

Ronald Reagan

Milton Berle

Jonathan Winters

Dom DeLuise

Flip Wilson

Don Rickles

Gene Kelly

George Burns

Ernest Borgnine

Red Buttons

Redd Foxx

Telly Savalas (no Brylcreem here!)

Jack Klugman

Rich Little

Charlie Callas

Jilly Rizzo (Frank's driver and "body guard?" *putting a finger to my nose as my pinky finger ring glints in the moonlight*)

(I really should have bought stock in Unilever, the company that makes Brylcreem, or at least in a tuxedo making factory.)

A handful of decades later, and Dean's MGM set looks old, gaudy. The tuxes outdated, the bow ties bombastic. But the hearts were real, as real as they'd be today, if they had not stopped beating so long ago. Back then, they only ever beat on love. Life's downbeats, all those entertainers knew, but by God, that night held none.

There were jabs at Frank's womanizing, his hatred for the paparazzi, and how skinny he was in his youth. George Burns said, "Sure, you're handsome now, Frank, but look how long it took you to grow into those ears (paraphrased for George, and possibly my two cents added).

Not once in the storm of jabs was there ever a hint of disdain from Francis Albert. If you had followed his life, you knew Frank had a hair trigger temper. You saw it simmering in his steely blue eyes. But on that night, on that dais, he knew love when he heard it, and every bit warmed his soul.

Today, this same world is tone-deaf.

Loving jabs, we know not. Now it's all serious, all the time.

Be ready for the insult!

Bulldoze for rights over loving fights!

Battle for what's yours by merely showing up!

Everything matters!

Except for understanding and love.

Grab everything, not by earning it, not by taking the hard licks we've ALL had to take in life, if we've lived long enough to watch these roasts live on TV.

(Yes, you read me right. I said ALL OF US. I don't care if you have three heads and your skin color is neon green. Nobody gets a full Pass in this life, pal. No one.)

Success is achieved by finding quiet, witty, creative ways around those perceived lack of rights, those so-called elitist rules that make it harder for you to succeed. I, the so-called elitist White, had to do this in my career, my life. No matter who you are, there are gates you have to hurdle.

Cogitate on that, too, oh hapless rioters.

I’m sure your uber-offended, youthful, inexperienced heads are exploding right now.

You'll never get what I’m saying until your wisdom outweighs your youth.

Life ain't a straight road, peeps — black or white, young or old, rich or poor, healthy or sick.

If you're breathing, you're on the earthly scenic tour from hell.

Just like Frank and Dean and Telly and Redd, Ruth and LaWanda, too.

Hang on tight around the tire-squealing corners. Your pearls won't save you now.

Yeah, that dais knew monumental failure and astronomical success, abiding love and endless loss, distilled joy and sorrow’s abyss.

Scarring all.

Healing all.

Maturing all.

Hardening their mettle. Making them able to discern a joke from a jab.

For it's only in scratching out a survival in the lowest valley do you know how to truly appreciate joy at the highest peak.

And at the peak, you receive life's most previous gift — laughter — laughing more at yourself than others. You learn to take joy where you can find it, whether you’re Joe Shmoe or Frank Sinatra... on a fake dais, in a fake room, in a fake building, in a city full of fake lights or on a street corner, or at work, or in an online group chat.

You matured enough to discern a joke from a jab.

You don’t get your undies tied in knots over every little comment.

You know love when you see it.

You can walk in other people’s shoes, whether they be spit-shined dress or scuffed work.

~~~

There wasn’t a soul on the dais that night who didn’t know a joke from a jab.

~~~

Most are all gone now.

And with them, maybe the ability to ID jokes from jabs.

~~~

Their flickering images dance upon my bedroom wall late at night, as I watch and remember and miss… then click them into nonexistence, as I X out the browser page.

No bouncy intro music.

No glaring klieg lights.

No gaudy bunting.

No hazy cigarette smoke.

The smiles gone.

The laughter mute.

The love light in those flickering images extinguished for all time.

The only proof that they and that dais existed at all is in my sore stomach muscles and my throbbing jaw and in my smiling eyes and lively beating heart that for even one hour and 38 minutes I, too, laughed and loved and easily recognized jokes from jabs, and felt alive again in this oh, so uber-offended world.

Yes, even in death, the men on that dais gave me the kiss of life.

It's sad that I have to look into the past to smile these days. Maybe if the world would stop fighting, stop being so offended, for just a wee sec, we all could hear the laughter again and be warmed by our own beating hearts, and I wouldn’t have to find comfort in the dead.

Think of this post, this roast, the next (umpteenth) time you feel dissed by someone, for god knows what, and this time, just don't...

LET. IT. GO.

If we don't find our way back to unapologetically laugh and love at freewheeling speech, Frank and Dean will call us all Clydes to our faces, and we will bloody well deserve it.

And if you don't know what being a Clyde means… yep, I'll say it for them. You're a Clyde.

~~~

Who knows? Maybe the solution to happiness all along lay inside a tube of Brylcreem, and I never even knew it.

~~~

Rest well, you dais souls.

Damn, do I miss you all.

A Notice of Post Rotation for Author, BJ Thompson

2022-04-19T15:43:00.004-06:00

For the foreseeable future, or at least until I complete the two major book projects I have on tap, I will be writing in rotation for this and other websites under my name (see list below, and you are welcome to follow each/all for their updates).

That means that I will still be posting episodes, articles on these sites every Tuesday, but only on one of the five topics per week (copied to all associated sites, of course), so that I may have more time to complete the big book projects whose deadlines are this summer and fall.

I do apologize for this rotation, but I have been neglecting several of these sites that also need my regular attention. I do hope you understand. This rotation will begin next Tuesday, April 26, 2022. Thank you for your support!

Best Always,

Barbara

~~~

Topics:

Words to Write By… and Books by BJ Thompson

Author Website - http://www.booksbybjthompson.com/

Medium - https://medium.com/@BooksbyBJThompson

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/BooksbyBJThompson/

Burb’s Buck & Buntline Inn

Social Commentary Site - http://burbsbuckandbuntlineinn.blogspot.com/

2^nd Official Tate-LaBianca Murders Blog – on Manson Family Murders in 1969

https://2ndofficialtate-labiancamurdersblog.blogspot.com/

STOP Not Writing… NOW

Writers Coaching Website - https://www.stopnotwritingnow.com/

Medium - https://medium.com/@STOPNotWritingNow

Substack - https://stopnotwritingnow.substack.com/

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/74123987

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/StopNotWriting

Simily – Fiction

BJ Thompson – Short Story Works - https://simily.co/members/bjthompson/

Episodic Animal Adventure Series - The Life & Times of Tiger and Rat

https://simily.co/members/lifeandtimesoftigerandrat/

~~~

There's only so many hours in the day...or night...

Dead Eyes — We All Have Our Own Tom Hanks Moments…

2022-03-17T19:10:00.004-06:00

There’s a path all human beings trod. We are not long on it when it forks — the right; the path is clear and clean, and in the far off distance a heavenly vista, with sunlight streaming through flittering verdant leaves — the left, the path unbroken, dense undergrowth, no light, no discernible way.

Our eyes lock on the right fork. We barely notice the left as we gleefully turn and take the glorious path. We are not long on it when a crack, crunch, thunderous sound erupts from a giant sequoia toppling to the ground, right on that glorious path, its height and girth so immense there is no way for you to climb over, under or go around. Your way is stopped cold.

No rhyme, no reason is given for the obstacle now blocking your way. All you know is that what you saw as your future path is no more. It’ll never be an option for you again. You suffer scrapes and bruises from the tree trunk fall. You’re not mortally wounded; it just feels as if you are.

~~~

This scenario comes to all human beings who dare to strive, to trek into the unknown, hoping for a bright future. On the walk, when we take it, being so young and inexperienced with life, the blockade hurts. It really, really hurts.

You held out such promise for that fork in the road. It looked perfect in every way. All you had to do was walk down it, and the world would be your oyster, and you, nestled safely inside, are made beautifully whole as a shimmering pearl.

~~~

Now, you are stopped. You still live and breathe, and life is still offering you two choices as it did with that forked path — take the left fork, the one presenting as an abyss, and work like a grunt with machete in hand to carve out a path for yourself, one slashed dirty, prickly weed and unearthed root at a time… or return to the very start, and choose to die before you’ve ever lived.

~~~

My late father would hate that I’m telling you his tale of woe. He’d probably not speak to me for months, or who knows, maybe ever. But the one gift my father gave me was learning from his mistakes, and boy, did he make a bucket full… but don’t we all?

My father had a Tom Hanks Dead Eyes moment.

(Backstory: Listen to the podcast “Dead Eyes,” hosted by Connor Ratliff, where he dissects his life experience about losing a bit part in Tom Hanks’ episode of Band of Brothers. If you don’t listen to Dead Eyes, you’re an idiot, and there’s no hope for you. Go listen. Even if you stop reading me. It’s the lesson you, we all, need to learn or re-remember learning. If you don’t completely hate me after listening, return here and read this article ’til the end. I promise your hate for me won’t increase, and you might just forgive me. Life is full of weird shit like that.)

William “Leigh” Thompson was a bright, exceptionally intelligent farm boy hearkening from the Orangeville, Ontario region, WNW of Toronto. In 1932, Leigh was 18, and he was excited. His Aunt May, a well-heeled relative in Toronto, had promised to pay for his tuition to go to university, to study something important that would get him off the farm and into a stellar career to become a Somebody.

When it came time for Leigh to apply, at the last minute and with no reason, his Aunt May didn’t fork over the money, and my father had that figurative sequoia crash in front of his heavenly fork in the road of life.

Flash forward so many decades, and my father went to his grave blaming his aunt for why he didn’t become a Somebody.

It’s ironic, actually, because he went onto be a Constable in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and in later years the Head Buyer for General Electric. He had much success. He had people noticing him and looking up at him. He looked so dashing in his police uniform, my mother fell in love with the man. He made a mark wherever he went. He arrested bad men. He had high-flying liquid lunches at Toronto’s York Hotel. He had underlings. He made important decisions. And when he chose to drink over having that career, even the big boss from General Electric came to our house and asked my mother what he needed to do to get Leigh back on track.

And with all this success — with the adulation, the prestige, the power and the money — none of it mattered. When the alcohol took over, he would return to the sad story of his aunt May and how she’d stolen his chance at being a Somebody.

My father, like all the rest of humanity, had a choice: take the left fork and carve his own path, or return to the start and die before he began to live. Leigh Thompson chose to die, a slow, slogging suicide by drink, all the while blaming others for his downfall.

In effect, my father was not Connor Ratliff. He didn’t have Connor's courage or fortitude or grit to machete through that overgrown left fork in the road. He had envisioned the heavenly right fork, taken a glimpse at the serene vista, smelled the fragrant scent of stratospheric success, and when it was snatched from him, he thought, there was no more fight in him to carry on. For the next 53 years, he would walk through life as the living dead.

Flash forward again to my life, and my hopeful stellar future, where I worked through school to afford to go to university. I achieved a university degree and a technological school associate degree, and I began on my way to that dreamed for a career in public relations. Then, in less than 5 years, I fell deathly ill, and was forced to retire from the 9 to 5 work world right there and then, and forever. That figurative sequoia tree fell right in front of me, too.

I was as my father as was Connor Ratliff. We all suffered from Dead Eyes.

But Connor and I chose not to die before we had lived. We walked over to that feral left fork and with machete in hand, sliced and slashed, grunted and groaned our way forward, creating a new, if not rough-hewn, path to an unseen future that in the end, was the right path for us after all.

Such a serendipity path would have been on offer to my father, too, if he had the courage to take it. No farm work, no yard work, no building a retaining wall out of fieldstone in the sweltering Ontario summer heat would stop the man, but when it came to working for the title of Somebody, his grit disintegrated like ashes on a campfire heap.

Failure: I’ve learned from my father that failure is the KEY to success. Yes, at that moment of failure, you are so very hurt. If you’re Connor Ratliff, you go buy a record in a record store. If you’re me, in the dead of night on countless nights I cried alone while my family slept, blinded by that failure, grieving the loss of what I “thought” was me, the Barbara Thompson, a Somebody.

Connor went on to work at a bookstore for 13 years, eventually returning to acting once he had processed his Dead Eye moment.

I did roughly the same as Connor. I learned to live with my illness and slowly reinvented myself, doing what I had always done best in my day job, what I still could do being as sick as I was, and that was being an editor and being a writer.

It took years to get well enough to write full time, and took more years after that to up my skill and hone my craft, and the work of being a writer continues, just as being an artist continues for Connor.

Connor Ratliff and I chose that left fork, and we’ve carved our own paths. Every inch we have fought for and worked for, and none of it has been easy, but all of it has been satisfying, for not an ounce was easily given. We earned every step.

The Moral of the Dead Eyes Story: Tom Hanks wasn’t Connor’s bad guy. Aunt May wasn’t my father’s bad gal. My illness wasn’t bad. Those figurative sequoia trees felled in front of us may have been the events we needed to force us to carve our own paths, to not take the road more easily travelled, to become for ourselves our own versions of that elusive Somebody.

My late father failed to see that more valuable option. Connor and I saw the way. For years, the going as tough, holy hell was it tough, Connor would wholeheartedly agree. But if asked, would Connor or I have had it any other way, knowing what we know now? Our answer: No. Connor needed Tom to say No. I needed that illness to say No. We were on the wrong fork on our road. At the time, we just didn’t know it.

~~~

If I had one wish, I wish my father could have his life to do all over again, or at least live long enough to see how he had taught me to fight when the going got so very Dead Eyes rough. Maybe he’d be proud of me as I think Tom Hanks turned out to be proud of Connor, seeing how his dead eyed actor chose the road anything but scenic, but making the trip oh, so memorable.

Success Life Hack: If you’re 20-something, and you think you know the meaning of that word, think again. Sometimes your greatest failure ends up offering the road to your greatest success.

My only regret: I wish my illness could sit down with me on a studio set, so we, too, could have a long chat like Connor had with Tom. As I listened to that interview, I envisioned that sequoia tree trunk disappearing in front of Connor’s eyes, and this time, he had no desire to travel down that heavenly path. That, in a nutshell, is freedom. In the end, Tom Hanks gave Connor that.

Ukraine — Our Time is Now2022-03-03T13:16:00.002-07:00
 
Many
 decades ago, I was sitting in my family room, listening to mom and dad 
talk on the war — World War II — for that was their time to shine. Yes, 
this was the 60s, almost two decades away from that bloody conflict, but
 to my parents’ generation, the wounds were still very fresh.
I
 looked up from playing with my Barbies, astonished, when I heard my mom
 say, “If I could have, I would have joined up.” My mom was only 13 when
 Hitler invaded Poland. My little girl ears took her statement as 
literally taking up arms and dying for the cause to restore freedom in 
Europe.
Mom
 was confused at the horrific look on my face. She never saw into my 
mind’s eye. And I never explained myself, only begging her to never 
“help.” I had no idea what she actually meant — women becoming volunteer
 nurses or joining the Red Cross or the military as a secretary or 
administrative clerk. All I knew what that her calm demeanor to join and
 fight the Axis foe scared me to death, and didn’t make any sense. Why would someone, who was safe, put themselves at risk for people so far away? Thankfully
 by then, Hitler was dust to the ages, and the idea of a world war only 
existed to me as flickering images on our tiny black and white TV 
screen, in films like, “A Bridge Too Far,” “The Longest Day,” “The Young
 Lions,” and in, “Where Eagles Dare.”
Zoom
 forward some 50 odd years. My parents have long since passed. And now 
it’s me sitting in an easy chair with an adult’s mind, my Barbies long 
since lovingly stored in a trunk along with those childlike memories.
~~~
A
 week ago today, Putin invaded Ukraine. It’s 2022, and the threat of 
all-out war has again reared its ugly head. Poland, 1939, version 2.0. 
Sadly, humankind can’t even seem to go a century without replaying the 
horrors of a world war, putting us all on the precipice of destruction.
As
 with Poland 83 years ago, so goes Ukraine. Then as now, freedom-loving 
countries could not, cannot, allow a dictator to wreak havoc, cause 
untold destruction, and attempt to rule the world with an iron fist.
The
 Cold Hard Fact: Dictators never stop, until they are forcibly stopped. 
Their warped mind, their psychopathy, it doesn’t allow them to stop. 
Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, then, Trump and Putin, now, they all must be 
stopped, at any cost, for to look the other way, and appease…well, that 
was tried before with Neville Chamberlain and a piece of paper signed by
 dear, old Adolf. Do you remember the outcome of that war as we 
initially turned our cheek? 50 million dead.
The
 Bright Side (if there is one): If Russia’s invasion of Ukraine gets the
 extremist Right Wing world to remember why their aberrant ideology was 
and is so devastating to mankind, and moves them back on a more 
humanitarian, moderate track, backing freedom and individuality over 
hate and fear, then maybe the destruction and the lives already lost 
will not have been in vain. Maybe this is the wake-up call we in the 
west need to remind us of what happens when you back autocrats purely 
out of hate and fear.
Yes,
 today, the roles are reversed. Russia and their oppressive Communism 
are the invading force, while Germany and their robust democracy are 
offering up arms to stop yet another insane dictator banging on Europe’s
 door.
No matter the country.
No matter the time.
No matter the people.
Against such hate and fear, appeasement or isolation is never the answer.
Western
 countries must look outward, and not in. Free people must sacrifice for
 the oppressed, every time, anytime, and no matter whose door is being 
broken down.
Our
 world, thanks to the Internet, exists more now as a village than a 
faraway land. What affects one, affects us all, whether we choose to 
open our eyes and see the horror, or skulk away and turn our heads, 
pretending such atrocities affect only the Other, and never Us.
It’s
 time to eliminate the leadership dregs of the Cold War, those 
Stalinist, Hitlerian hangers-on who still believe that ruling by one 
through communism or fascism, void of individual voice and personal 
freedom, is the only way.
As
 you read this, Ukrainians, our fellow human beings, are suffering and 
dying in unimaginable ways, under an egomaniac who will never stop, who 
will never back down, who is hell-bent on destruction, solely for his 
own aggrandizement and power, unto his own death. Nothing less.
~~~
 
My parents did their duty to defeat Hitler.
·
 My mom helped gather old cooking pots and scrap parts for her town’s 
metal drive to help Canadian factories churn out more military weapons.
· She accepted getting married in a blue suit dress to save white satin material for the making of parachutes.
·
 My father, already long with the RCMP and too old at the time to enlist
 (he tried, and was turned down), gave blood countless times and guarded
 the home front as a constable, always on the lookout for infiltrating 
spies, thwarting their covert operations.
· Both lived on food rations, behind blackout drapes, and lived without, for many years.
·
 And both sat glued to radios in the evening, listening to the 
blow-by-blow of Hitler’s devastating blitzkrieg on lands and peoples so 
needing our Allied help.
~~~
That
 WWII generation is all but gone. They sacrificed and worked and did 
their duty for their country and the Allied effort, and those 
nerve-racking times rightfully colored how they lived and worked for the
 rest of their lives.
· No living above one’s means.
· No accepting credit when you could pay by cash.
· No taking anything or anyone for granted ever again.
· And where one saw hurt or need in another, one unquestionably helped.
As the children and grandchildren of that generation, our time is now.
It’s
 our turn to stamp out autocrats wherever we find them, be it Trump in 
the States or Putin in Russia, wherever a messianic leader comes to the 
fore. Whenever their evil tongue and greedy ways suppress mankind. We 
must stand up to these bullies as we would in a school yard, to call 
their bluff, to be at the ready to fight, willing and able to say NO to 
all their pathetic games.
Today,
 economic defiance will do more to defeat this kind of foe, like Putin, 
than all the tanks rumbling east. But by whatever means necessary, we in
 the west must commit to the fight, no matter how the slap-back lands on
 Putin’s door. We must refuse to invest or consume or communicate with 
those who are hell-bent on decimating others.
The
 Cold War is heating up, and it’s now The Great Cash War, where 
civilized western countries WILL monetarily freeze out Putin and his 
oligarchs, or anyone who wantonly does harm to another. And time is on 
our generation’s side.
· We will also give blood.
· We will back Biden and Trudeau and all western leaders in sending arms and matériel.
· We will donate to the Red Cross, Save the Children, and all other humanitarian efforts to assist the Ukrainians in their time of need.
· We will swallow higher gas prices, and not swallow Russian vodka.
· We will support a faster track to immigration, offering Ukrainians resettlement in the western world.
In
 this, our time, we will sacrifice and supply and offer emotional 
support, for only by the grace of God, go us. Poland, 1939, is happening
 all over again, and could happen at any border, at any time, in this, 
our ever turbulent world.
For
 our deceased loved ones of The Greatest Generation, who spent their 
young lives fighting an evil foe, we will make them proud by not shying 
away from this, our moment to shine, by gladly doing our part, as they 
so valiantly did.
~~~
Decades
 on, my little girl fear has ebbed away. I now know what my mother meant
 when she said she would have gladly joined the fight.
For what I can do, for what I can offer, now is my time, and I will gladly stand up, and fight the good fight.
If not our forefathers, then who?
If not our foremothers, then who?
 

COVID-19 Vaccination - I Got It. Here's What Happened...

2021-04-27T13:07:00.001-06:00

PBS.com

Thursday, February 27, 2020, to Friday, April 23, 2021

421 quasi house arrest harrowing fear-fueled days and nights, and I didn’t even commit a crime.

On Friday, April 23rd at noon, I breathed for the very first time since COVID-19 hit my corner of the planet.

February 27th I remember well. I shouldn’t have, as it was not a special day, but it was the last day I went outside into my world, shopping, and carefree, without a mask and a fear of dying.

You see, my fear rests deeper than most.

On December 12, 2011, I suffered a pulmonary embolism — a blood clot in the lungs — that the head doctor of my hospital said was “the mother of all blood clots,” the largest clot ever seen in a patient in the history of that hospital. I had virtually no blood pressure and was given tPA — tissue Plasminogen Activator, in layman’s terms, a massive clot buster med, that makes you hemorrhage from every orifice in your body to quickly dissolve the deadly clot — and a 50% chance at survival. Both of my lungs collapsed, the left side of my heart collapsed, and I was put into a coma and on a ventilator, as I was unable to breathe for myself. So, you see, I know a thing or two about ventilators and living on a razor’s edge.

I miraculously survived that PE. A teenager in my same city experienced the same clot that year, and she died. Doctors said it may have been from all my years of competitive swimming that made my body damn hard to kill, even at 47.

Ten doctors tried, but failed, to find the cause for the clot, as I had zero symptoms or catalysts. It just happened, and I just happened to survive, thanks in great measure to the incredible doctors in Calgary, and to Canada’s wonderful healthcare system. I was literally given a second chance at life. But I was left with a narrowed airway from being intubated for so long, so my ability to fill my lungs, which came out of that attack virtually undamaged, is permanently hampered, and I fight to breathe every day, on a good day, without a respiratory pandemic floating around.

Hence, after February 27, 2020, I was basically housebound. Getting COVID-19 could very well be a death sentence for me, so I stayed at the house to stay alive. On that last shopping trip, I had bought a decorative pillow with a word embroidered on it. You need to know I am not the type to buy things like this, especially things with words. The embroidery on the pillow simply read,

My providential pillow...

How utterly providential, for how could anyone of us know that in the year to come it would be that social grouping that would grieve so much and heal so much through its very fight to exist?

Like all of you great earthlings out there, I had to throttle back life expectations and adopt a new normal for myself. Luckily for me, I’m a writer, so I spend a lot of time inside my head. I don’t need much outside stimulus to keep me centered.

But I’d be lying to you if I said these last 421 days have been easy. They have not. There’s been a roller-coaster of emotions, from crying jags to anger to just plain muted fear, resulting from confusion and doubt, and an unknown future.

American Chemical Society

I knew all I could do was patiently wait for the world’s gifted epidemiologists to formulate a vaccine to save us all. And while others went shopping or dined out or even gathered in groups inside and outside, I stayed home in isolation, and I waited…

But that isolation gave me a chance to study the vaccine science. No, not social media blurbs about quasi-science or hearsay gossip, the actual peer-reviewed data on mRNA vaccines — what they are, what they do, and what they don’t do in terms of harming people. Since Day One, I’ve never had a doubt about the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines. I just had to stay healthy and alive long enough for it to be my turn at the needle… 421 days and nights.

Watching the news and seeing the ebb and flow of the global hospitalization rates and death tolls took an emotional toll on me, too. I knew what it was like to be on a ventilator. I was conscious for part of it. I knew the terror of not being able to breathe on my own, to have an airway and feeding tubes down my throat, to not be able to talk or eat or even drink, living solely on liquid nourishment piped directly into my stomach. I never want to be put on a ventilator again despite the fact that it was that very device which saved me.

So, I came into this pandemic with a specific game plan: stay away from close contact with people to stay alive. To do any other thing could bring death, and the way I saw it, I’d be lousy company anyway if I were dead. I had to sacrifice big, now, to live fully, later, and there could be no deviation from this plan. None.

COVID-19 Fatigue? Nope. Not for me.

Dinners out with friends? Nuh-uh.

Strolling through malls? Not gonna happen.

It wouldn’t matter if I had a mental meltdown. I could never deviate from the plan. This was my personal war, and I had to win every battle.

Does my plan sound harsh? Weird? Impossible to accomplish? Maybe. But there was no negotiation. I had to sit tight, keep healthy, adjust my expectations to control my emotions, and wait for the science to catch up to my body.

When my eligibility came up, I put myself on two pharmacy waitlists and made an appointment for May 12th with a third. Whichever popped first would be the one I’d take, cancelling the other two. May 12th seemed so far away, and the COVID-19 variants were ramping up. I truly wondered who would win the race — variant infection or my vaccine?

Then a text message beeped on my phone. On Monday, April 19th, I was notified a spot was open for me for that Friday. I jumped at the chance, registered on the spot, and patiently waited, yet again, for Friday to come. Those five days were the longest days of my life. I purposely kept busy writing, working around the house, so I wouldn’t go mad counting the seconds as they so laboriously ticked by.

Then Friday came. Holy cow, it was truly here!

I readied myself and drove to the pharmacy, arriving on time. With a double mask, I entered the drugstore, made my presence known, and waited to be called. Sitting socially distanced in the waiting room, every second again laboriously passed. Never once did I fear the vaccine. My fear lay with those 421 days of having an immune system that had no defense against the ravages of COVID-19 (Note: I took the Moderna shot. My doctors said I could not chance another blood clot with the AstraZeneca).

The pharmacist came out and called my name. I went into his mini surgery, hopped up on the examination table, and he talked with me a while about my condition. Then as I removed my sweater and lifted the left shirt sleeve, he told me to breathe in. There was a slight prick, and as I breathed out, he filled my arm with the life-saving serum. He applied a circular Band-Aid, instructed me on any side effects I might experience and what to do if they occurred. He told me I would be called sometime in June for my second dose, barring any vaccine delivery delays. He handed me a prescription slip as proof of my dose, and after a 15-minute stay in the waiting room to see if I had any immediate adverse reaction, I was out the door to a brand-new future filled far more with happiness and hope than fear and doubt. I was so utterly happy, I couldn’t even cry happy tears. Before I left the drug store, I profusely thanked the pharmacist for all he and his global colleagues were doing, to risk their own lives to save ours.

All the way home, I kept giggling like I had drunk an entire bottle of champagne, celebrating New Year’s Day, and, of course, for me, April 23, 2021, became New Year’s Day. Day One at my second chance at life. How lucky can one human being be?

Over the weekend, the upper part of my left arm was a bit sore, a feeling similar to muscle pain after working out. I remained a wee bit tired throughout the weekend, so I didn’t fight the feeling. I rested, and got decent night’s sleeps. I had an ever so slight twinge of a headache that never really took hold, so I didn’t even take a Tylenol. And beyond that, no adverse side effects at all.

I signed up to be a part of a national survey to let virologists/epidemiologists know of my physical reaction to taking the vaccine. Doing so is my tiny way of giving back to the multitudes of scientists around the world who worked around the clock to give me the gift of life.

Two weeks from April 23rd, I will achieve 52% immunity from COVID-19 with the Moderna vaccine. At that time, I will be able to go out shopping for essentials with my double mask and keeping my distance from others. Two weeks after my 2nd dose, I will achieve 94% immunity, and then I can be around others who have had both doses, too.

I can wait.

I can patiently wait.

After 421 days of waiting, I’m pretty darn good at this waiting game.

In this interval, I can breathe in the gratitude I feel for all humanity.

In this interval, I can send positive thoughts to those who have been afflicted with COVID-19, who at this very moment are fighting to breathe themselves and remain alive on those life-saving ventilators. Survivor’s guilt lingers in me when I think of those we have already lost, but it’s also been the impetus for me to publish my story, to convince others to take the vaccine, so the world can begin to save more lives than it loses.

Four days after my shot, I remain in home confinement.

I continue to find joy and contentment in the little things that happen all around me in my little world… most especially my ability to breathe in and breathe out, and the wonder I feel as that miraculous vaccine swirls inside my body, readying its forces to protect me against any COVID-19 attack. With each healthy inhalation, I’m reminded I have been given another chance to see blue skies and hear birds sing and feel God’s kiss of life on my cheeks as a gentle springtime breeze. I am abundant in my isolation.

Be afraid of the Covid-19 disease.

Never be afraid of the Covid-19 vaccines.

Read up on the science to eliminate your Fear of the Unknown.

And once you do, and your eligibility comes up, register for your shot.

And do it freely, happily, joyously, for that day will be your new New Year’s Day.

You will save your life and the lives of all others who come in contact with you. What could be greater than that?

~~~

This was what happened to me at noontime, Friday April 23rd, 2021.

I have been physically and spiritually uplifted every second of every minute ever since.

Get your shot, and you will be, too.

Dyatlov Pass - The Two Why's and Answers for Both

2021-04-12T13:39:00.005-06:00

Teodora Hadjiyska, co-author of the book, “1079–The Overwhelming Force of Dyatlov Pass,” said in 2018 on her dyatlovpass.com forum,

“That’s the problem with this case. Unless 12 jurors agree on something and even then it’s arbitrary. In Russia, the decision is made by judges, not jurors. We will never agree on anything. I am not saying it because I think I’m right and you are wrong, but because I don’t even know what ‘solving the case’ means anymore.”

My copy of Teddy’s book.

Photo of Teodora beside Dyatlov memorial, dyatlovpass dot com

Teddy, as she’s generally known, seems to have grown weary of the case, and who can blame her? Treks to Russia to interview the players, delving into archives, crafting a book, giving interviews herself, and baby-sitting forum dwellers… it’s enough to make anyone exhausted and jaded and lost in the miasma that is the Dyatlov Pass incident, when nine cross-country skiers lost their lives in a quest to reach Russia’s highest tourism honor in 1959.

And yet, the interest never wanes for us armchair travelers…

The questions that linger in that frosty February air for Teddy and for any pilgrims to Dyatlov Pass are;

Why did all nine hikers flee their tent?

Why do we still care?

What drives us, literally or figuratively, to make the days-long journey into this barren, frostbitten land of hurricane-force winds and driving snow?

Could it be the same impetus which drives people to obsess about the JFK assassination or the Manson Family murders? Do we have a visceral, psychological need to turn back time?

As we gaze out the sniper’s window at the Dealey Plaza, Dallas, 6^th floor School Book Depository building onto Elm Street, do we shout down to President Kennedy, “Jack, duck! Tell Greer to gun the engine and get the hell out of Nut Country!

Or as we take a drive up Los Angeles’ Benedict Canyon, and look at the gates of the estate once addressed 10050 Cielo Drive, do we cup our hands, and holler, “Sharon, close and lock your screened-in dining-room window, and call the cops, now!

If it is that same emotional drive, then it must be what has us figuratively grabbing at Igor Dyatlov’s coat sleeve, and begging the group leader, “Igor, for God’s sakes, get the hell away from Kholat Syakhl and return to the safety at the Auspiya River to camp for the night. You can’t succeed if you don’t live!

But something tells me there’s more to our collective obsession about what I’ll coin as the Dyatlov Nine.

A great deal more.

Unlike the JFK or Tate-LaBianca deaths, normal people — those of us who were young once and felt invincible and did daring things in our university days — cannot liken our lives to great political leaders or beautiful movie stars, but we can readily picture ourselves taking on a quest through the great white north, cross-country skiing with friends along alpine vistas and amid pristine white swirling snow, feeling the biting nip on our red noses and cheeks, as we attempt to conquer nature, and our own primordial fears. There but for the grace of God go all of us who have ever thirsted for such adventure.

The photos of those faceless skiers fighting the driving snow become our faces, and we own their fate. And none of us, then or now, want to die a Dyatlov Pass death. And so, in fighting for answers for the two Why’s, we save ourselves by finding solutions that ended them.

One of the final photos of the hikers, taken February 1, 1959

When we view the horrific photos of their corpses, we see not their expressions frozen in time and disturbingly deformed, but our own. Their final moments of horror and hell on earth become our final moments. It is we who lie alone on that barren, windswept tundra, and no amount of crying for our parents will save us like no amount of crying saved them.

We know we are about to die.

We must do it in pain. And we must do it alone.

And for all of us — no matter our country, our politics or our culture — we know there can be no more pitiful end to such vibrant lives.

Our visceral need to reverse their course to Otorten, to save these poor souls, is simply a way of saving all of us who remain. Our need to eradicate this risk becomes all-consuming, and the only realistic control we have in this event is to solve the mystery, to give ourselves an out, a way to never end up walking in their footsteps. For each day that the Dyatlov mystery lives, and their ends are cemented in the unexplained, we are tortured along with them, asking ourselves, could such an end breathe for us, too? Such unanswered questions are often too much to bear. You either X out all the Dyatlov websites, shelve the books, turn off the videos, and push the event to the back of your mind, or you dig in, and you fight on, for a final solution that even Teddy has discovered may not completely arrest your disquieting thoughts.

What I know for sure — and there’s very little to know for sure in this case — is that none of the players in this incident did anything wrong.

I’ll repeat that. No one in this horrid tale did anything wrong.

That point is often missed in this discussion. The fateful end of the Dyatlov Nine was a perfect storm of,

a) what Mother Nature can do to you if you chose to dance in her backyard, and,

b) what living under a secretive, blame-obsessed, and punishing autocracy can do to its citizens.

The USSR in the mid-20^th century was a cloistered world, and its citizens well knew that if you accidentally made a mistake as a government worker, and you wanted to stay out of a Siberian gulag and not be tortured or killed, you covered up that accident and you stayed forever mum. In 1959 Russia, no good came from a “comrade” admitting fault and subjecting his co-workers and his family to unthinkable blame-game consequences.

Back then, the USSR was the world’s second most powerful country, eagerly vying for first place over the United States. Under Stalin, and even under Khrushchev’s Thaw and the mounting pressures of the Cold War, the country had to project an air of steadfast superiority in all things. Perfection of its ways and its people had to be the norm, whether vying for a Level III tourist rank in the taiga or working in the industrial heartland.

There was no political will or patience for human mistakes. If university hikers accidentally got in the way of geologists searching for uranium in the Northern Urals, and deaths were the result, that error in judgement could never be publicly admitted, else you ended up in an Ivdel gulag never to see the light of day again while your family, without a bread winner, could become homeless and starve. It was never that a Russian citizen didn’t want to be a responsible worker. To screw up on the job didn’t merely blacken your work record; it could become a matter of life and death. That oppressive kind of life was a constant juggle between civic responsibility and self-preservation. And therein lay the birth of the cover up and secrecy mentality — a deadly combination. So, when citizens needed help, those doors to help could quietly shut. The collective always superseded the individual.

In that diseased societal mix, the Dyatlov Pass Incident was surely to happen sooner or later.

Today in Russia, with the Iron Curtain more like a flimsy veil that with technology allows the world to peer over that veil, it is doubtful a similar fate would ever befall another trekking group. Word would leak out and the world would react, and social, political will would force autocrats like Putin to eventually do the right thing… or that’s what I hope would be the case, *cough* Navalny *cough*.

Knowing this political backstory allows me to see more clearly the realistic possibilities of what actually occurred on the night of February 1, 1959. Of all the scenarios proffered in these last 62 years — and at last count the theories number as high as 75 — Igor Pavlov and Teddy Hadjiyska’s assertion outlined in their book, 1079, is the only one that fits. It’s the only realistic explanation of why all nine hikers freely chose to flee that tent despite threat of hypothermic death.

It’s rather ironic that countless online investigators entertain the weird and wonderful as the catalyst for this event but are quite mum on Teddy’s result. Her theory explains both the physical actions, natural occurrences and motivations of all the players during the days leading up and after that fateful night. Innocent actions on the part of both the hikers and the nearby geologists had them inadvertently cross paths that sparked an unforeseen, singular, and destructive force that cost nine hikers their lives, and would have cost some geologist lives too, were it not for their quick thinking. The Dyatlov Pass Incident is a simple happenstance event where no action was intended to be diabolical.

· Even if Igor had submitted a copy of his trek route to the UPI hiking club, doubtful the club would have thought to notify the government’s geologist miners.

· Even if the miners knew Igor’s route traversed their own, doubtful they would have admitted said to the UPI hiking club.

· Even if the miners wanted to move out of the area to let Igor’s group safely trek, doubtful the government would have authorized that move.

And it would have been a frosty Friday in the USSR before the government would publicize when or where they were exploring for uranium, as that, you can be assured, was classified as a state secret. Thanks to a lack of transparency, the left hand never knew what the right was up to. To my thinking, it was a miracle such a deadly confluence of events hadn’t happened well before the Dyatlov trek.

Secrets and lies, secrets and lies. The death knell of any society.

~~~

An aside: In my research for this article — reading transcripts, documents, articles, books, watching documentaries, and listening to interviews — Teddy’s theory is not talked about online at all, her own dyatlovpass dot com website and forum being the exception. Everything from a Yeti attack, to gun-wielding escapees, to mind-crazed winds are theories batted to and fro by wholly uninformed podcasters and You Tubers, who I gather more espouse content quantity over quality, eagerly spewing great heaps of misinformation, so much so I end up blushing from embarrassment for them. I won’t even dignify the Discovery Channel’s so-called documentary film on this incident with a lengthy dissection, other than to say that I’ve “discovered” said channel obviously now lives to spew shock & awe, freak-show tripe. In a word: disgusting. If any Russians today listen to and/or watch these shows, they must think the West is rife with ignorance, and who could blame them? A little more research due diligence over reverence for the almighty advertisement dollar could go a long way to clearing up the muddied waters in this case.

~~~

A serious investigator has to be skeptical about all assumed facts in any case. So, it’s utterly shocking to me how armchair sleuths calmly accept that the tent was erected where it was found. Why obsessively rip apart the minutia factoids but never question the obvious? Igor Pavlov was smart enough to realize this, and Teddy saw the light, too. For me, the moment I heard Teddy being interviewed about their results on a Vancouver radio station, the lightbulb inside my head blinked on, and stayed on. It was the same ah-ha moment I had in the Maura Murray missing case when sleuths kept assuming Butch Atwood told the truth about Maura’s last known moments.

Following red herring clues down bottomless rabbit holes while ignoring evidence right in front of your face seems to be the hallmark error of amateur sleuths. It’s the difference between letting the evidence guide the investigation instead of the investigation guiding the evidence.

In the Dyatlov Pass Incident, all one needs to ask is,

If in 1959 Russian officials favored cover-up over transparency and subsequent punishment for worker error, why assume all the facts as originally presented are correct?

Yes, it’s true. Igor Dyatlov did indeed want to push the envelope as per their achievements on the trek, but why would he elevate the risk before the group had even succeeded in reaching Mt. Otorten? If Igor wanted to document greater feats like tenting in riskier locales, why not do so after the main goal was achieved? To go to such extremes could risk the loss of their Level III tourism status and forever tarnish their sporting reputations. I cannot believe any of the nine would have voted for that by agreeing to camp on that exposed slope.

As the day of February 1, 1959 wore on, Igor and the others skied through worsening weather, with wind gusts reaching Category 1 hurricane speeds on the slope near summit 1079. Only the day before, the group was forced to patch countless holes in the aged and weather-beaten tent. They knew the tent had seen better days. And knowing that, why would they risk their only means of shelter, and survival, to such battering winds when,

a) a treeline was within sight?

b) you’ve got another 10kms to even reach the half way point of your trek?

Igor may have been a driven soul, but I don’t think he was stupid. He had surely read UPI’s most popular trekking tourism book, “On the Road of Trial” where it clearly states that to camp on bare rock is dangerous and near impossible.

Fact No. 1, the only fact you need to know:

The Dyatlov tent was never pitched on that barren slope. The authors of 1079 are absolutely correct.

The tent was pitched a mile down from the slope, in the tree line, at or near the large cedar tree. The group probably decided that was the only safe thing to do after they fought to complete the dig of the labaz (returning supplies cache). They realized the difference in protection between the tree line and the barren landscape. The risk to the tent’s further destruction in those fierce winds, and thereby risking their own survival, would have made the decision obvious as to where to pitch the tent. Without one word of debate, I suspect, all nine trekkers turned their skies downward towards protection.

Once settled on a space inside the tree line, the nine would have got right to work, divvying up the camp site chores. My imagined scenario:

· Igor, Kolevatov, and Sasha erect the tent.

· Zina and Doroshenko assemble the stove, as according to their made up newsletter, The Evening Otorten No. 1, those two held the assembly record.

· Lyuda, Tibo and Georgiy gathered firewood for a camp fire and the tent stove, with Georgiy climbing the cedar to chop off some thicker, dry cedar limbs. We know somebody climbed and cut, as bark held skin remnants and limbs are seen cut.

· Rustik starts the camp fire, but try as he might, the wind gusts keep putting out the fire before it has a chance to build a decent amount of embers, so after an hour or two of fighting, the group decides to let the fire go out, forgoing a hot meal in favor of cold plate leftovers of salo — slices of cured pork belly fat — and crackers inside the tent. The carafe of water and cocoa Lyuda prepared sat abandoned near the camp fire, mixed but cold and untouched, that in the sub-zero temps would soon freeze.

· Per Igor’s orders, boots are lined up in the corner of the tent and packs and coats blanket the floor.

· All nine lay side by side in various positions on either side of the tent stove, the tent and the stove heat the only two barriers between life and death for that group on that night.

· Sometime between 7:30 and 8:30pm on February 1^st, “the event” occurred that would test their survival in the dead of night. Sunset was at 4:58pm and twilight was at 5:52pm. I base the event time on the watches recovered from the site. Author, Donnie Eichar of Dead Mountain puts the event at 9pm (Ch. 28 book, Dead Mountain). See my detail list (below) on the watch evidence cited on dyatlovpass dot com.

The Event > a massive and completely rock-hard frozen tree limb breaks free and crashes down onto the nine hikers as they lay inside the tent.

This is the only unexpected, instantaneous, rational, reasonable, and natural happening that could,

· cause severe physical injury and/or immediate threat of death,

· force the hikers out of the tent in various stages of undress,

· in -30 C degree temps and hurricane-force winds,

· in the dead of a moonless night.

The event itself was natural. The ensuing cover up and extreme theories propagated thereafter have been anything but.

I don’t need to be told twice about how rock-solid trees become when frozen. I accidentally skidded into a trunk while downhill skiing one year, and even though I was able to slow my speed enough to only body check the trunk with my right upper leg, I was left with a 3-foot long black and bloodied bruise for months. I venture to say that a frozen tree is as lethal as smashing into concrete, and one that falls from a great height onto prone bodies would produce lethal results.

Although I do not to pretend to present here the detailed and thoroughly comprehensive thesis put forth by the authors of 1079, this is my gist of that event which ultimately led to the deaths of the Dyatlov Nine:

What started this whole disaster ball rolling was geologist miners conducting an airborne survey in the southern reaches of Mount Otorten to detect magnetic anomalies in the search for uranium deposits. The geologists looked for ground rich in chlopinite, a pitch black mineral containing uranium. In 1950s Russia, to conduct such surveys, geologist used 5kg antimagnetic, anti-tank blasts which explode in mid-air, often just above tree top level, burning the tops of trees (pgs. 276/77, book 1079).

February 1,1959 was a Sunday, and such work was often done on the weekends. Sappers, as those geologist miners were called, who worked under the direction of Shapovalov, had past, repeated negligent deaths from such blasting (pgs. 287/89, book 1079). Neither group — the Dyatlov Nine nor the sappers — knew the other group was in that area. The reverberations for such blast mining could very well have dislodged or dislocated weakened, rotting or dead tree limbs. Igor and Teddy believe, as I do, that as the trekkers reclined in the tent, a large limb broke free, severely damaging and trapping the tent and the items therein, causing varying degrees of injuries in all nine hikers.

Doroshenko and Krivonischenko died first because of stove burns and fatal cranial injuries. They were probably unconscious, very near death, when dragged out of the tent by the others, and in the body shock and frigid cold, their systems began to quickly fail. In shock and grief, but unable to move the tree limb to grab their coats or boots, the survivors were forced to remove the dead men’s’ clothing to have a chance at survival themselves. I could envision Igor being the pragmatic one, ordering the clothing removal. Everyone would have been in a state of shock and hysteria, and crying.

I believe Igor kept his head that night, and made a plan. Zina, Rustik and he would head together up the slope to reach the labaz, the supply cache, in the hopes of retrieving an emergency medicine box they had stored there (pg. 127, book 1079). Or, they were headed toward the summit to erect some sort of mayday sign, as Kolevatov had seen planes flying overhead on the previous days. But in the swirling wind and snow, all three wandered off course and became separated, and in the frigid temps and body shock, they soon succumbed to the elements, and collapsed in the snow at varying degrees of distance up the slope.

I suspect the labaz was actually buried where the rescuers later found the tent. As they had brought cardboard on the trip — what hikers used for a buried and not tree-hung labaz — it was obvious Igor had always planned to bury the cache (pgs. 309, 318, book 1079). All the geologists had to do to re-stage the scene was swap out the labaz for the tent. That explains the calm, unhurried snow tracks along the slope and the oddly placed and undisturbed items in and around the slope-pitched tent. The downed tree limb they merely chopped up and removed. And as for any extra boot prints, the re-stagers could have brushed them away and let the winds and the snow take care of the rest in the 21 days they had from the time of re-staging to the slope tent discovery.

One of the four last survivors — Lyuda is my guess, as she may have been the one to melt the snow for the cocoa or walk down to the creek to break a hole to fetch water — knew that the ravine was more sheltered from the wind, so when Igor, Zina and Rustik didn’t return, the final four headed in that direction and managed to construct a den of pine boughs and pieces of clothing, but something took them away from that den. I doubt we will ever know what caused that departure, but it may have been Lyuda’s worsening condition, as the medical examiner stated in the autopsy report that she probably only had 20 minutes to live due to a cracked rib penetrating her heart. Tibo, Sasha and Kolevatov maybe knew the only hope to save Lyuda was to return to the tree line camp site and retrieve their skis and attempt to ski out and seek help. But when those three didn’t return to the den, Lyuda attempted to find them, and she headed in the same direction. The three men, first, then Lyuda, accidentally fell through a snow-covered patch over the 24-foot deep ravine, and all four were buried alive under hundreds of pounds of snow. Such hidden dangers were known by the locals to exist. Between their previous injuries, the cold and no breathable air, all four quickly succumbed. I believe the reason Lyuda’s body was askew from the three men was because she fell separately, after the men, but with many of their actions that night, I doubt we will ever know for sure.

I also don’t believe we will ever know who of the nine was the last to die. Although it logically looks like it should have been one of the ravine four, my spidey sense whispers it was Zina. I can’t say definitely why I think this is, and of course I have no proof. But that thought haunts me to this day. Maybe it’s my feeling that of all nine, Zina was like a mother figure in the group, a supreme fighter and defender of all whom she loved. That mother bear personality comes across in her words and deeds, and in the photographs. I think her big heart is what touched the children at the District 41 School where the group agreed to give a talk in exchange for shelter. After all, it was Zina who crawled the farthest up the slope. I believe that in her fight to reach the labaz she was only thinking of the medical kit to save her friends’ lives, so, thankfully, I don’t believe she realized she was the last to die. I think Zina thought Igor and Rustik were right behind her as she bent her knee for that final time, and collapsed unconscious in the snow. If that was her end, and it was quick, there is God’s grace in that end. I refuse to think otherwise, for that lovely soul I would have given anything to befriend.

It’s our need to pray for a quick release from their terror and pain that us gripping so tightly to this tale. None of us want to walk their walk, be blinded by that stormy black night, feel the numbness creeping into our limbs, and be the last to die, leaving all we’ve ever known and all we’ve ever loved. We need to make sense out of Mother Nature’s nonsensical, so that it may never happen again.

Sadly, I think Igor Dyatlov died more out of guilt than from the cold. Igor had a big heart and a pride and passion to do things just right, so any mishap under his leadership he would carry on his shoulders, and he would blame himself. Igor collapsed, losing all physical ability to walk on, and looking skyward, his arm hugging the tiny birch bough, he may have whispered, God, why? Why us? Why now? What did I do wrong? And maybe as he took his final breath, and his mind faded to black, God gave him the answers, and he rested still. Igor, it was not your fault. You were a great guy and a fantastic leader. You did everything right. And we who remain salute you and wish you everlasting peace. Your countrymen and group members love you to this day.

The grizzly ends of the bodies of Lyuda, Tibo, Kolevatov and Sasha, beyond their severe injuries from the fallen tree limb, were merely due to natural body decomposition, animal predation and microorganism decay. There is nothing sinister in the missing eyes or tongue. Soft tissues will always decay or be eaten first. Those four were buried in melting snow and rushing water until May 5^th. That’s three months and four days after the event. To not see such body decay after that amount of time, with flesh exposed to the elements, is unthinkable.

Simply said, there is no other-worldly or sinister “there” there in any of these nine deaths. The sooner people see this, the better for the Dyatlov Nine resting souls.

The excellent tree limb fall and injury comparison diagram on page 339 of the book, 1079, shows how the group could have been lying in the tent when a limb collapsed onto their bodies. On page 341, a forensic department head agreed that the injuries correspond to this scenario. The four with the most severe wounds could have been laying closest to the heaviest part of the tree limb.

Experts stated that the hikers would have been unconscious or dead within 30 minutes with the -30 C degree (-40 wind chill) temperature, where hypothermia/frostbite would set in from 5 to 10 minutes (pg. 342, book 1079). And as soon as the adrenaline wore off, the pain and cold would have been severely felt, body shock gravely affecting their internal organ function. By that estimation, that would make all nine hikers dead well before the waning crescent moon rise at 3 a.m. (Ch. 28 Dead Mountain). At 9:30 a.m., helicopter pilots reported, “… strange objects had been spotted from a flight over the Main Ural Ridge south of Mount Otorten. They looked like human bodies.” (pgs. 279/80, 342, book 1079)

It’s my belief officials spotted the dead Dyatlov Nine well before the group was considered missing and well before the official search ever began. That might explain certain documents that have been uncovered and were dated February 6^th.

Photo dyatlovpass dot com

~~~

B. J. Thompson’s Dyatlov Pass Incident Details

As the online world has to one degree or another made errors in presenting the details in this case, below, in alphabetical order, are some of the more crucial points, with attributions provided where possible.

· Alcohol–Many online commenters state the hikers had been drinking. Autopsy tests showed NO alcohol found in their systems (dyatlovpass dot com–autopsy reports). The medicinal amount of vodka found in the tent was drunk by the rescuers on the night of February 26^th after they found the tent. “We shared [the vodka] out between us—there were 11 of us, including the guides,” Sharavin recalled. “We were about to drink it when one guy turned to me and said, ‘Best not drink to their health, but to their eternal peace.’” (BBC News’s Lucy Ash interview of Mikhail Sharavin, 2019)

· Avalanche–slope angle from top to tent = 16 degrees, far under the needed 25-30 degrees for an avalanche angle (Ch. 24 Dead Mountain). Skis used as tent poles on the slope stood completely straight, as did the ice axe, and yet we are to believe there was a snow slab that buried the hikers in the tent. There was no snow tear line up the slope as evidence of a rupture, and no gathering of snow and/or a debris field below the tent. Items inside the tent, like a row of boots, a carafe of frozen water and cocoa, and laid out food of salo and crackers were sitting upright and undisturbed. Impossible after an avalanche.

· “Blood” in Lyuda’s Stomach–“The stomach contains up to 100 cm³ of dark brown mucosal mass.” Often misquoted as coagulated blood. “The cause of death is stated as hemorrhage into right atrium of the heart, multiple fractured ribs and internal bleeding.” The dark brown mass in the stomach is not recorded as blood and therefore was not a result of her missing tongue. (Autopsy report of Dubinina–dyatlovpass dot com)

· Boots/Socks Not Worn-my guess is that the grouped footwear was trapped under the heaviest part of the fallen tree limb, so they were unable to retrieve those items.

· Carafe of Cocoa–where did the water come from if not from melted snow over a fire or scooped from the ravine creek? They wouldn’t have used all their hiking water for a drink they’d never touch. Nobody in the group would have made the cocoa drink if they couldn’t heat it on their disassembled stove or their non-existent slope camp fire. Proof, yet again, that the campsite was in the tree line.

· Carbon Monoxide Poisoning–the stove was found not assembled in the slope tent; therefore no ability for CO poisoning. When the stove was assembled, exhaust pipe used every time. There had been no problem reported with Igor’s stove on the previous nights. The many holes in the tent and the fierce winds would have had any CO accumulation seep out of the tent.

· Cedar Climb-I believe one of the hikers climbed to gather more firewood or branches for ground protection/warmth, possibly wanting to make a lean-to to provide shelter from the cold when the tree fall ruined the tent. All evidence of said would have been removed by re-stagers of the scene. No one climbed the cedar to see the slope, as the winds and nightfall would have made viewing anything past a few feet impossible.

· Darkened Skin of Dyatlov Nine–UV rays from sunlight and/or cloud cover, 0% humidity, and elevation contributed to the darkened look, the skin being partially mummified. (Ch. 26, Dead Mountain)

· Fight/Confrontation–No lacerations consistent with a fight between the hikers or outsiders. No ground blood splatter. No footprints seen anywhere in that area that displayed a skirmish of any kind. No recorded evidence of any severe hiker discord. No motivation for any outsider to attack hikers.

· Government-wide Cover-up–In the 60 years before the ‘90s Glasnost, no one in the government ever tried to destroy the investigation file. If the Russian authorities wanted the hikers dead and the file gone, they would have disappeared long before any search began. No bodies would have ever been discovered.

· Hurricane at the Pass - on the night of February 1, winds were 25-35 meters/second, recorded at Ivdel meteorological station. 35 meter/sec = 78.3 mph, which equals a Category 1 hurricane between 74-95 mph. Yet another reason why it would have been physically impossible to pitch that 80 square foot tent on that slope (pg. 333, book 1079 and online wind speed calculator). Also, a tent riddled with so many holes, group mended or not, would have ripped apart in the force. Igor’s clothing would have been whipped down the slope and not found next to the tent, as well as the Made in China flashlight found sitting on top of the tent with snow below seen below it.

· Ice Ax Comparison Photos–No proof that both photos were taken at the same site. Hiker (bottom) photo could be of the labaz (cache) dig/prep. Ice ax could have always been placed in the same position whenever they prepped a site, as Igor’s group was very methodical in their work. The ice ax placement could also be proof that the tent recovery site was the original labaz site. (photo comparisons from Theories–dyatlovpass dot com)

Photos dyatlovpass dot com

· Infrasound/Karman Vortex Street–summit’s dome shape/hurricane-force winds could create said (Boot Rock is too jagged a shape), but not affect all nine hikers to the same degree, to flee their only shelter without at least their boots, nor would it cause the severe injuries. Experienced hikers would have studied the phenomena and would have known how to react. No need to cut the tent to escape. Also, no signs of vomit on snow from vertigo/inner ear disturbances. Rescuers who stayed up at the Pass for close to 3 months never reported any such sound/wind affects.

· Katabatic Winds–Made in China flashlight wouldn’t have remained lying on top of the tent if such fierce downdraft winds had occurred. Proof that Igor, Zina, and Rustik would have never attempted to climb back up the slope against those winds.

· Krivonischenko Knife (Den)-“Krivonischenko’s knife was found close to the bodies, it was used to cut off branches of young fir trees.” Confusion between what was found, merely the knife sheaf or the knife. If knife ended up missing, it was probably taken by one of the re-stagers or rescuers. Times were tough in ’59, and if the knife was considered valuable, it could have been swiped. (The Den–dyatlovpass dot com)

· Mansi Mountain Names–Mt. Otorten = Mountain of Swirling Winds, not Don’t Go There (media hype), Kholat Syakhl = Barren Mountain, not Dead Mountain.

· Mansi Tribe as Murderers–Historically, a peaceful people, and no recorded history of the group ever attacking outsiders. By 1959, Mansi members said they rarely ventured to sacred sites to pray, and Kholat Syakhl, aka Height 1079, had never been a sacred site.

· Missing Hikers Eyes, Lips, and Tongue of Lyuda, Sasha and Tibo-as previously mentioned, soft tissue erosion in melting snow/rushing water by microorganisms, animal predation and environmental factors after 3 months of exposure.

· Mystery Photos - Krivonischenko Frame 34–at Teddy’s dyatlovpass dot com forum, she states, “technological shot made in the photo lab before the film was taken out of the camera.” Zolotaryov Photos–“Damaged film from the camera found on Zolotaryov's body.” (dyatlovpass dot com) Damage occurred while camera was submerged in melting snow/creek water.

· Radiated Clothing–only 3 pieces of clothing were affected, belonging to Kolevatov and Georgiy (Lyuda wore Georgiy’s sweater after he died). Kolevatov worked at the Institute of Special metals, NII-9, in the extraction of metallic plutonium (pg. 32, book 1079). Georgiy worked at the combine industrial plant No.817, aka Mayak, that in 1957 suffered the world’s 3^rd worst nuclear disaster. The decay measurements had to be 50 to 100x greater to be dangerous. (pg. 266, book 1079 and Ch. 26 Dead Mountain)

· Ravine Fall Explaining Severe Injuries–at the time of their deaths, the snow level would have been far deeper than the 15 or so feet the rescuers found on May 5^th when the bodies of Lyuda, Sasha, Kolevatov and Tibo were discovered. There’s every chance that when the four tumbled into the 24-foot deep ravine, the stream’s jagged rocks and stones were not exposed as they were in May, and they simply fell onto snow and died of their tree limb injuries and asphyxiation, never sustaining any falling injuries. I disagree with Eichar on this rock ravine injury scenario. (Ch. 26 Dead Mountain)

· Snow Tracks–these were not the tracks of the Dyatlov Nine. These were likely the calm, measured sapper/military re-staging tracks made when they swapped the tent and labaz sites (possibly why a military boot strap was found near the camp fire/cedar tree site), proving why no running/fleeing tracks were seen. “’Six pairs of footprints [were going] from the tent to the ravine; to the left from them, in about 20 meters, there were two more pairs of footprints.’ In fact, those were not the eight pairs of footprints going down the slope, but the tracks of an ascent and descent of four people.” The odd shapes of some of the tracks were caused by wind erosion, drifting, and melting snow. Contrary to what’s been inferred, no tracks showed bare foot or sock impressions. (pgs. 311, 319-20, book Dead Mountain)

· Tent Locale–The most popular UPI trekker book in 1959 was the 1958 published, “On the Road of Trial.” It clearly states that to camp on bare rock is dangerous and near impossible. There’s no doubt Igor read this book and knew better. (pgs. 272/3, 303-5, book 1079)

· Tent Cut on One Side-my guess is the fallen tree limb blocked the other sides, and it was only the one side with which they were able to cut and break free.

· Tent Stove–where the tent was found on the slope, the stove was placed in the middle of the tent, slip covered, the pipes sitting inside, unassembled. Why? Because on the slope, there were no lateral ridgepoles on which to affix the pipe. So why place the stove in the tent at all? There is no way, at those temperatures and wind chill, that Igor would not have assembled the stove. Proof again that the tent was never erected on the slope. (pgs. 310/11, book 1079)

· UFO’s/Aliens–Never happened. Nothing to see here, folks, move right along.

· Urination Snow Stain–How do we know it was from one of the hikers and not from someone after the fact — geologists/military re-staging the scene? And even if stain was hiker made, it could have been done when they buried their labaz on the slope, and not the tent. No proof tent was erected there.

· Watches–“Dyatlov was found with a Zvezda on his left hand showing 5:31.” “Thibeaux-Brignolle was found wearing two wrist watches on his left hand, a Pobeda showing 9:38 or 8:38 and the Zportivnye showing 9:15 or 8:15.” Frozen watch tests at that temperature freeze from 8 to 25 minutes due to lubricant/ condensation freezing, stopping the mechanism. (Watches In The Dyatlov Group, dyatlovpass dot com) This says to me that the event occurred earlier than 9pm.

· Weapons Testing/Fire Orbs–Eyewitnesses only report said on February 17/18 and March 31^st, not on February 1/2. The only documented rocket tests were 1,200 miles away. There is no direct causal link between said and the hikers’ injuries/deaths. (Ch. 17, book 1079)

· Yeti/Predator Attack–no animal paw prints, no bite marks, no blood splatter, no tearing of limbs or clawing lacerations, and no fur or hair tufts found on the snow.

· “Yeti” Photo Comparison–the photo before the “Yeti” photo is of Tibo in the same coat and hood. They were fooling around and snapshots of Tibo were taken. The hikers even allude to the joke in at least one diary entry and in their made up Evening Otorten No. 1 newsletter. The “Yeti” image is blurry because the Zorkiy camera lens accidentally focused on the foreground tree instead of Tibo in the background.

Photos dyatlovpass dot com

Yuri Yudin Leaving–he suffered from rheumatism, sciatic nerve, back and knee pain, which undoubtedly was exacerbated by that final truck bed trip to the District 41 logging camp, as the truck had no hydraulic shocks to cushion the ride over the rutted roadway. It would have been by sheer force of will that he managed to ski out the 15 kms back to Vizhay. Pain was the only reason he abandoned the hike.

· Zinc-lined Coffins–merely a bio-hazard deterrent. I don’t blame the helicopter pilot for insisting, as at that point in the recovery, no one knew the group’s cause of death.

~~~

It must have been difficult for Georgiy to abandon his cherished mandolin in the labaz on the morning of February 1. He and the others knew that from that point on, the fun and games would have to be stilled for the serious trek ahead. They, of course, had no doubts they would succeed. They were very skilled and experienced, heavily prepared and supplied. They skied off into the powder grey distance, assured of their fate.

That’s what makes their ends so difficult to accept. We need for them to succeed. This is not about countries or politics or even about sporting badges or reputations. It’s about young people the world over relating to this group, knowing in our hearts we all could have been such good friends, and done the very same. Through our tireless examination of the facts, each one of us has fallen in love with Igor, Zina, Georgiy, Kolevatov, Lyuda, Tibo, Rustik, Doroshenko, Sasha, and Yuri Yudin, too.

Maybe that’s what Sasha meant when he said the whole world would know about their trek. We do, indeed, Sasha, but our awe for the group isn’t about your quest. It’s always been about falling in love with you wonderful souls, thanks to your diaries and letters and your fantastic photographs. You made us love you.

In my mind, as I figuratively retrace their ski tracks, smell the clear alpine air and let it fill my lungs, I glance up and watch the snow fall from the pine boughs and let the crystal flakes prick at my rosy cheeks, Mingled among the whistling winds, I hear the warm strains of Georgiy’s mandolin playing a tune from the movie, Symphonie in Gold, and nine voices gleefully sing along. I hear laughing and shouts of glee and the clapping of happy hands, and Georgiy takes a bow, blushes and laughs, too. In this land of snow and ice, I feel no cold, for thanks to the Dyatlov Nine, the Auspiya river valley all the way up Dyatlov Pass holds an ethereal and everlasting warmth, the unforgiving landscape having been graced with their presence. The biting cold and the driving winds may remain, but where fear once reigned, only love grows now. In our universal caring, we have all figuratively reignited their campfire flame, and in so doing all nine hikers look up at us, and smile. They are no longer alone on Dyatlov Pass. We all live there now.

Blow Snow, a poem by B. J. Thompson

Blow snow, blow, snow blow,

The wind, a fearsome growl,

A crack,

A fall,

The trunk maims us all,

And no one hears us howl.

Blow snow, blow, snow blow,

Our breath, it’s all but done,

Our movement, no limbs,

Our eyesight grows dim,

Our hopes and dreams are none.

Blow snow, blow, snow blow,

The driving crystals are near,

Our zeal for this quest,

Oh, Lord, we failed the test,

In fetching, wrenching posits, we fear.

Blow snow, blow, snow blow,

Our corpse rescue is nigh,

Yet dead, we can’t speak,

No more can we twig,

To the ghastly ends, we did spy.

Blow mighty winds, do blow,

Across this frozen land,

Where we once stood,

And we gave but good,

Yet unto God, we gave our hand.

Blow mighty winds, ever blow,

Over 60 long years, they still growl,

Frozen tears, no more shed,

Frozen fear, no more dread,

For our hurt, The Lord has swallowed.

Blow death’s breath, do go,

For our love has conquered our pyre,

Our hikers’ hearts,

They sing as larks,

Your remembrance, our everlasting fire.

The Delphi Murders ~ Their Loss is Our Loss...

2021-03-08T12:27:00.003-07:00

February 13, 2017, wasn’t a good day in the wee hamlet of Delphi, Indiana.

Two teenage girls were brutally murdered in a peaceful, tranquil setting, and for the first time ever in criminal history, thanks to technological innovation, we who survive to witness the aftermath saw what the victims — those wonderful teenage girls — saw, and the reality shakes us to our very core.

Usually, after a murder takes place, all that remains is the crime scene, the evidentiary remnants of evil acts perpetrated upon the innocent. We shudder, block from our mind’s eye, the victim’s final time, as no one with a heart and conscience wants to partner the innocent with the damned — and in this case, the beautiful Monon High Bridge Trail and two blooming flowers of youth, and a killer of children.

I grew up in pastoral surrounds similar to Liberty German and Abigail Williams. As a child, I, too, spent hours on country roads and back country trails, gazing at wildflowers and touching tree bark, and watching creeks and rivers flow. At that time, neither I nor my parents thought much of my tom-boy wanderings. My parents favored Liberty German’s grandmother’s view — fresh air, being physically active, getting to know nature. What could be better for kids?

Knowing what we know now about that idyllic Indiana afternoon, will we tomboys of old, we free-range kids now full-grown adults, allow our kids outside to play on their own ever again?

The sad ends of children murdered by predators has a long and storied past, of course, but the Delphi murders ramped up to a horrific degree our visceral experience of such ends. Thanks to Libby and Abby, we saw and heard what they saw and heard. And that visceral calm before the storm hits us like no other.

As proof, you only had to watch the tortured faces of the law enforcement officials, who gathered for that first press conference, to know that what they witnessed — watching and listening to Libby’s cell phone recording and viewing the crime scene — was a traumatic bridge too far. Very seldom do you see obvious pain and fear on the faces of experienced cops, so when you do, the dagger strike to the heart is severe. Through the wonder of technology, we on the outside stood for a moment in those girls’ running shoes, and as technical voyeurs, for those few seconds, we became Libby and Abby, the theoretical becoming the actual, that grisly reality forever setting these murders apart.

We watched evil approach, quietly…head down, shoulders slumped, target zeroed in.

We listened to evil talk… calm, controlled, and calculated.

We anticipated, with stilled breath and beating heart, the danger approaching… with nowhere to hide, nowhere to run… no chance to live.

Our collective innocence was killed as surely as those two beautiful girls on that warm winter’s day — total devastation — in a pastoral scene of bare tree branches that held birds tweeting merrily above a musky ground of dried and crunching leaves, as the languid Deer Creek water shimmered in the pale sunlight.

When I look at Libby’s Snapchat photo of an empty Monon High Bridge, my mind’s eye paints the scene. Libby and Abby are standing at the end of that bridge, as flickering visions now, their eyes looking directly at me, their expressions somber, their pleading carried as a whisper on the wind,

Take care, watch and listen. Beauty doesn’t always breathe in beautiful grounds.

Libby and Abby want us to continue to adore the trees and the wildflowers, and eagerly watch the tadpoles swimming in shallow creeks. But they stand before us now, and forevermore, as warning lighthouse beacons, to steer us away from far-off shadows, for shadows can be colored by the dark.

That day, the girls did everything right.

They asked for permission to go.

They went together, in the middle of the day.

They had an adult drop them off, and scheduled for an adult to pick them up.

They had a cell phone to call for help.

And they ventured where other responsible trail hikers would surely be.

But none of those good intentions saved them. Because there simply is no defense against a hunter of humans.

Maybe that warm winter’s day, the birds in the trees sensed the killer.

Maybe the ground squirrels and chipmunks, and fish in the Deer Creek sensed the killer approach.

And maybe when he trod by, all sat silent, still, the blood coursing through their tiny veins running cold.

But animals can’t warn us, and even if they could, we have no innate sense, no bodily defense, against human hunters. It’s not like predators wear bright orange caps and vests, and carry a rifle, and that there’s designated, lawful days to hunt man.

Maybe the deer near the trails saw Bridge Guy, and they knew to scamper away. Maybe the Deer Creek waters ran silent the moment his boots pounded into the stream to catch a fleeing Libby, her black Nike shoe sucked off in the water-logged mire.

We who remain are left not knowing the ultimate end. And I’m not sure any of us are eager to know. When the monster is caught, as he surely will be, and the court trial divulges all, I’m not sure our collective psyche is ready for any more truth, for there but the grace of God, go us all. After February 13, 2017, thanks to the technology of one cell phone, and the sheer bravery of two children, we were all laid out in that bowl-shaped ground, and we were all made stone-cold.

~~~

Rest well, Libby and Abby, and thank you for blessing us with your love and grace.

We will work heard at replicating your good deeds, in your good names.

And we will heed your words of warning.

And with every step we take for you in further pastoral grounds, we will hear your laughter in the crunching leaves and see your bright eyes in the shimmering waters, and be warmly wrapped in your loving arms, for you have become our Mother Nature, and through you, we will again breathe fresh air.

Trumpism... America's Real Plague?

2020-11-16T13:54:00.002-07:00

Close to four years the world has been mired in the Fear of the Unknown, as the United States took its democracy to the brink.

Bit-by-bit, American’s rights and freedoms slowly eroded with a tweet or the stroke of a Sharpie pen upon an errant Executive Order, edging the nation ever closer to an autocracy through the consequential decision to vote Donald Trump in as president. The days of America being a shining democratic beacon upon the North American hill along with Canada were fading fast, and the world watched helplessly as the U.S.’s global strength slowly ebbed away.

On that dark November night in 2016, all rational souls felt the air leave their lungs after the Trump presidency was called, and since then, we have held what was left of our breath, fearing what terrible, despicable, irreparable damage that man could wreak.

And Trump’s words and deeds have been horrendous.

Each and every day for the last four years, the world has woken up, scrolled their new feeds, and groaned at the latest embarrassing or dangerous act of a dysfunctional and deranged man.

To sum up the experience in one word — exhausting.

And that exhaustion existed before Trump managed to kill a quarter million of his fellow citizens from an out of control pandemic. The utterly sad fact is that some Americans who voted for this man, who wore the red MAGA hat and stood shoulder-to-shoulder at his zero policy rallies were now dead. Stone-cold dead. Piled up in refridgerator trucks, waiting to be buried, never having had the chance to be held by their loved ones before they took their final breath.

Trump is not responsible for Covid.

Trump IS responsible for instituting no cohesive federal plan to fight Covid.

While the free world feared terrorist bombs falling from the sky thanks to Trump’s loose lips with world dictators, Americans had a far greater in-house threat. Trump’s narcissistic mind and his profound inability to govern killed off 80 times the number of Americans who died on 9/11, and that death toll soars up and continues to rage on.

The American genocide took up virtually no space in Trump’s mind.

His goals for being president still lived on…

· Be a quasi-king/dictator, snuggling up to the idea of a never-ending term.

· Romp around in the White House — sleeping in, watching FOX, abusing staff, and not reading the Presidential Daily Brief.

· Soar in the heady skies via the overuse of the taxpayer funded Air Force One.

· Make grandiose rally speeches riddled with lies and disinformation, while...

· Pooh-poohing legitimate news sources as fake.

· Threaten career assassination to anyone who dare question his words or deeds.

· And slowly, but with zest and determination, swap out every ally the U.S. has ever had for every foe they’ve ever made because that’s what it takes to be a Kompromat in Putin’s and Erdogan’s armies.

It’s not like his psychological dysfunctions and leadership inabilities and mobster mentality weren’t already known… ask any New Yorker, any contractor, who has been threatened or stiffed. And then there’s the whole, I can’t go back to ordering hotel windows after being the President thing… yeah, where would the fun be in that?

The Art of Losing Deals is the book that should have been written about the gold-plated grifter. He knew nothing about property development unless you count arm-wrestling City Hall, kicking out coloured tenants or selling the Trump name on buildings he didn’t even own. And the ne’er-do-well still managed to go bankrupt six times on Daddy’s multi-million dollar dime.

It’s funny that, having Fred constantly bail out his loser kid. Daddy finally died, as fathers eventually do, and the screw ups Don makes now can’t be cleaned up by another round of dough, especially since Don had already stolen the lion’s share of Fred’s estate, robbing his relatives of their inheritance.

Yet, somehow, irrespective of the private and public nightmare that has been Trump, millions of Americans thought Don was the right choice.

New York Magazine

This is key.

Until an answer is found to explain why this voter mindset exists, Trump and his cookie-cutter minions — who if left unchecked, will procreate like bunnies — will never ebb from American politics.

That thought should send a chill down everyone’s spine.

To date, the Democrats haven’t accepted there is a NEED UNFULFILLED in half of the American electorate, and they are afraid to face the MAGAmites, to ask the question: Why?

When all is said and done, and the proverbial milk has spilled, it usually takes an historian — Jon Meacham to be exact — to shine light on and remind us of the obvious, for it seems only those who study the past recognize its potential to e’er repeat.

As Meacham pointed out on an MSNBC interview, Trumpism is the culmination of all the darkest American “isms” combined;

· Isolationism – you only have to examine the late arrival to both world wars to see America’s inherent inclination to hunker down and only care within and not without, that is until the bombs or sea mines literally explode on their doorstep.

· Racism – antebellum plantation slaves, 60s race riots, Black Lives Matter protests, anyone?

· Nationalism – an overzealous belief that American ways are always the best, no matter how far the bar is lowered.

Trumpism – my definition – an alt Right mélange of all the above with an Old Boys School mindset — old white men with money and power refusing to let The Others in on the deal — baked in.

The Economist

The question is: Hasn’t Trumpism been simmering on America’s back burner for decades?

If you agree with that political evolution, there shouldn’t have been any shock as to Trump’s kingship. The greedy Wall Street ‘80s and the birth of the raging Newt Gingrich/alt Right mindset started this elitist ball rolling. Add to that Islamic terrorism and a declining manufacturing base with no plans to retool the industry or retrain the workforce, and you have the lower educated blue collar workers swimming in a Fear and Rage soup that happily boiled over in 2016.

Yet, I’ll be the first to admit I was slack-jawed when I witnessed the Blue Wall of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania turn red. Being a Canadian, I knew our country’s moderate Left belief to lift all boats in a higher social benefits tide bled into those northern states. And yet, here I was, watching our cousins to the south march ever further to a nationalist Right.

It was impossible to not see similarities from the starving Germans post WWI, and how Fear and Rage drew them ever further Right with the help of their own ill-educated, psychologically dysfunctional guru. Some say this comparison is hyperbole, and yet the similarities are there in the timeline and motivation, and they are striking…

Uneducated, unemployed labourers, desperate to feed their families, seeing an outlier promising a return to better times, as long as they kept The Others out of the country and away from their jobs…

Any historian can see the parallel. The starving Germans needed not to starve. The jobless Americans needed no foreigner to take what little manufacturing jobs remained. Fear and Hate > MAGA > Trump.

The question becomes: If half of the electorate still managed to vote for Trumpism even after their leader made a colossal international, domestic and cultural mess out of these last four years, doesn’t that beg for a political reckoning on the Left?

Maclean's

Like everyone else who watched with bated breath the 2020 election results slowly trickle in, and saw that promised Blue Wave morph into a Red Mirage, the thoughts were, by God, not again? What is wrong with the States? Many of us assumed 2016, like Trump, was an outlier, a nightmare never to be repeated, yet here we were, watching over 70 million Americans head to the polls and prove the pollsters wrong, again. If there aren’t polling company boardroom execs red-faced and raging, demanding answers and course corrections, the public will never again heed the stats of another American poll. Heck, their ilk may already be extinct like that of the Do-Do bird, for all I know.

The question morphs: Is Trumpism here to stay in the Congress and Senate regardless of a Biden presidential win?

The answer is scary, and moderate Americans don’t want to even entertain the possibility.

Worst Case: if the Democrats don’t face the MAGA force and figure out how to cure their ills, the U.S. will again be under a Red Repub Rule, and this time it may longer stick, and to the entire world’s detriment.

Best Case: You can have all the moderate Left-wing presidents you want, but if they have no legislative power because the MAGA mindset still pervades in the Congress and Senate, then all you have is a 4-year quasi-king with a pen and Executive Orders that then become revoked by the next 4-year quasi-king.

The laws never changing.

The citizens never benefiting.

The country never improving.

Infrastructure, manufacturing and civil rights erode beyond repair, turning that shining light on the hill into a dying ember.

As a freedom-loving North American, this scenario angers me.

Canada and the U.S. fought in two world wars, sacrificed tens of thousands of lives, to preserve and enhance civil liberties, to retain and make robust our manufacturing might and to defend humanitarian interests around the globe.

Hasn’t the world endured enough autocrats, dictators and despots?

Wasn’t North America the ONE continent where such evil would never pervade?

After the downfall of 2016, and then 2020’s Red Mirage, a little bird inside my gut whispered, Oh, really? Are you so sure? Another election, and another MAGA-infused outcome.

I put away the champagne bottle, and looked at James Carville with disdain. The exuberant grin that had been pasted on James’s face election night soon turned upside down. And as the week and the vote counting inched forward, I saw the usually pleasant politico turn into The Ragin’ Cajon. In TV interviews, he was a man of few words — maybe his mother taught him, If you can’t say anything nice… — but if looks could kill, well, history tells me to bloody well duck ‘n’ cover.

Law.com

But by the Saturday, James and I finally had reason to smile. I beamed as I finally raised a glass of bubbly to toast Biden’s win, and I know the whole world celebrated with me. That day felt so damn good. I exhaled for the first time in four years. Yet I knew by the next morning, Trumpism had not been eradicated. It was evident there would be no “Joenami.” And the faint thrum of a resurfacing scourge could be heard, as menacing and deadly as one of Hitler’s wolf pack U-boats, skulking through uncharted waters, readying for the kill.

That kind of fear held for too long turns into frustration, and as a Canadian, you say to yourself, “Okay, my American caring is over. If that bat-shit crazy country wants to hang itself and watch their rights and freedoms swirl down the crapper, fine, have at’er. Canada and the rest of NATO will march on without the MAGAmites!”

Throughout Trump’s first term, you could see the G7 leaders slowly pulling up their country’s draw bridges, stepping away from instead of engaging in further negotiations with the unhinged president, for nobody wanted to be ignored nor physically shoved aside nor brow-beaten by a mobster-wannabe.

I tried to pull back myself. I tried to wipe America from my mind. But as I tried, I heard a whirring sound in my head.

It was Eisenhower and Roosevelt spinning in their graves.

Patton, too, clawing at the soil, desperate to rise from the dead so he could slap Trump in the face with his riding gloves. And from his own resting place, General MacArthur hissed, “I shall return alright, to make this pipsqueak Donnie clean the West Point latrines with a toothbrush.

The generals were pissed.

Okay, I’m a writer. I have an imagination, and a wish or two…

No, Canada, the NATO countries, all had a responsibility to examine this dire cause and effect, and somehow… somehow… get the most powerful country in the world to stop drinking the damn Trumpism Kool Aid.

As the Grinch’s heart grew three sizes in a day, so could American’s desire to return to humanity in one election, through the hard work and decency found in Joe Biden. It’s odd how leaders will arrive when they are the most needed. It has happened in Canada and it has happened in the States. Maybe through the grace of God, the Trumpism tide has turned. Maybe America has seen the error of its ways and gave itself a second chance to right the ship, avoiding the sinking of the USS Republic by the deadly Trump berg.

Once Biden became the President Elect, the stock market soared over a 1,000 points, the G7 leaders quietly grinned, Dr. Fauci and the CDC scientists exhaled, and freedom-loving Americans ran out into the streets to rejoice. That kind of quiet assurance can literally be taken to the bank, and the hospital bed.

In the end, the only wall that had been built was the one around the White House, not to keep revellers out but to cage in the Bully from Queens. As transition hijinks, the Obama White House only unscrewed door hooks so the next Administration’s coats would fall to the floor. Conversely, the Trump White House is,

· not authorizing the GSA to ascertain the election, so sensitive information can be exchanged,

· firing moderates in the Pentagon in preparation for a possible coup, and if that doesn’t work,

· executing the administrative equivalent to Hitler’s Scorched Earth policy, for if Donnie can’t be king of the castle, then he’ll wreck the damn castle.

And yet, amid this chaos, the world knows Biden will eventually and confidently take the wheel, and facilitate change. He will ensure solutions be found to problems by experts who live and breathe TRUTH and FACTS. And the mainstream media will again be able to freely cover those facts. The world will witness a strong captain at the helm, charting a steady governing course. Amid a raging respiratory pandemic, knowing this, the world today BREATHES.

And yet, the Trumpism question remains…

How do moderate Americans get through to those 70+ million Trump voters?

· Can you educate the Latino community, especially in Florida and southern Texas, that South American socialism is NOT North American democracy?

· Can there be an online awareness campaign developed, targeting ill-informed Trump voters of the disinformation being propagated on the Right?

· Can Biden put through a Trumanesque Marshall Plan to retrain blue-collar workers to again earn a decent wage, not through antiquated fossil fuel manufacturing but through 21^st century, ecologically sustainable technologies?

· Can America kill once and for all the Old Boys School misogyny and racism, and treat every individual on their character and merits instead of their country of origin and the colour of their skin?

· Can these changes be steadily integrated, so people have time to accept change? Extremist, overnight acts will only have conservatives continue to fear the Left > this fear is why a lot of votes went to Trump in the 2020 election. Democrats won’t increase their base and make lasting change if they do it through bulldozing tactics. Are you listening, Bernie and AOC?

· Can Trumpism — the witch’s cauldron of Fear and Rage — die a final death, by Americans owning up to their “ism” tendencies, for you cannot fix what you cannot see, and taking concerted steps to abandon such societal ills?

It’s a big row to hoe. And the Biden/Harris ticket won’t be able to do it alone. The sad fact is America has trust to rebuild, at home and abroad, and it’ll take time.

As a Canadian, I’m not sure I’ll ever watch an American election again without holding my breath. As we never look at Dallas’s Dealey Plaza the same way again nor D.C.’s Watergate complex,

CNN

New York’s Trump Tower will forever loom large as a menacing beast, with out-stretched gold-plated tendrils, hungering to swallow innocents whole if they should stray too close to its shadow.

Yes, Mr. Meacham, history does repeat, it doesn’t just rhyme, and with each go-around, more innocence is lost and more permanent damage is done.

Every time Fear and Rage rear their ugly head, every time politicians ignore the warning signs, ordinary people on both sides of the political spectrum pay the price. While the coronavirus may be a scourge we will beat in 2021, the Trumpvirus will linger for years to come.

Viruses rage tonight. In the end, I’m just not sure which one we should fear more.