I launched Murder, etc. on February 26, 2019 expecting to tell the entire story by August. The story has since grown to the point that it will require the entire year to tell.

If you’ve not yet discovered the show, I invite you to check the trailer below, and if it appeals to you visit any of the links below to begin listening.

Thanks–Brad

Subscribe to Murder, etc. on iTunes

Murder, etc. website

Murder, etc. Facebook page

Murder, etc. Twitter

Murder, etc. Instagram

Other posts from Rapid Eye Reality:

• Day of Awesome w/ the boy continues. Introducing h…
• I have to speak to @absinthetics about introducin…
• Introducing the baby to Boston. Teaching him there…

The post Introducing Murder, etc. first appeared on Rapid Eye Reality.

On a previous adventure we ended up at convenience store in after-dark hours. No one could pay because the credit card machines didn’t work. We stood in the parking lot with some tired carnies as situations that required no escalation escalated to the point of people threatening to pull out their weapons. I was hoping this trip would go better, or at the very least have no threats of gunplay.

Actual home of the gas station sandwich

On this sunny summer afternoon a year later, my hungry friend ate a gas station sandwich as we looked out across the foreign landscape and wondered if we’d ever make it to our destination. We pressed on, sure if we kept the suns at our back, no carnies could catch us.

I tell you that to tell you how we killed the additional hours in the car creating a March Madness style bracket of vicious animals, pitting them against each other in a fight to the death, all along reminding ourselves that, of course, we would never be so inhumane as to sanction one of these matches (no matter how much we’d like to see certain people in the octagon with 17 rats).

If you are in any way familiar with my friends and me, you might have seen this debate playing out online or over the top of some empty beer glasses: of the two certain championship match contestants, would the Grizzly or the Silverback Gorilla win in a fight to the death? (Don’t @ me with your answer because there is only one answer, and I’m so firmly on Team Grizzly that our relationship is going to change if you sign on the Gorilla squad. Ignore the signing bonus they offer. Those people are bananas.)

The car ride, while ridiculous in just about every way, passed much faster as we finished our brackets and then played them out to the clear conclusion that the Grizzly is almost always going to win. You might have some crazy bloodshed and violence along the way. That Polar Bear might get in a couple of lucky shots. The capybara might show up angry and school the anaconda on what it means to be the world’s largest living rodent. But if you let the game play out a million times, that Grizzly is going to be your winner the vast majority of the time. Don’t argue with science.

You might be surprised to know that despite my deep interest in hypothetical bloodshed and the worst of nature’s malevolence, I am particularly opposed to sanctioned death matches in the real world. I am pro-life in the most literal sense. I really, really hate seeing people die, and I especially hate it when it’s something preventable. Heart attacks are gonna get ya. Cancer is gonna get ya. A grandpa who forgot for five seconds that he was driving a car is gonna get ya. Not a great deal you can do about it.

And yes, if you live in America, every once in a while, a bullet is gonna get ya. There are so many of them flying on any given day, we’d be running against expectation if we all managed to dodge them all the time. Remember, guns don’t kill people. Amendments kill people.

Nevertheless, if I cut back on the sodium and stop trying to make cheese sausage out of my arteries, I might just beat a cardiac event. If I lay off the smokes and asbestos facials, I can probably ward off most of the cancer. And if keep clear of public places like schools, nightclubs, movie theaters, military bases, and concerts, I might stand a chance of not getting shot.

Oh, you thought this essay was about how animals might hypothetically kill each other? No, no, no. This is about how animals actually kill each other with the help of other animals and how hiding is the only prevention measure the innocents are currently offered.

Sorry if you were misinformed. You might want to reconsider your sources. I understand there is a lot of Fake News! out there.

*

By now, you’ve picked your camp in the “we have to find a way to stop our kids from getting killed” debate. Getting you to cross a line to one side or another is probably a fool’s errand. The arguments have become so entrenched that they need their own guns and C-rations. It’s mental health. It’s gun control. It’s arming teachers. It’s turning schools into safe rooms. It’s muskets. It’s amendments. It’s a guy carrying an AR-15 into Target, because America and irony.

It’s “well, if you’re gonna ban guns then ban X.”

And that argument, friends, is why I’m here with my bloodthirsty animals.

If you find yourself in a gun control argument and lead with, “Cars kill as many people as guns every year. Why don’t you ban those, too?” then you have wasted your one opportunity to be heard as an intellectually honest person. You don’t actually believe in this false equivalence, and if you do, you should really consider reallocating the money you plan to spend on your next case of ammo on a logic class at your local community college. You had one shot at the King, and you missed way damned wide. You are…well, take a good look in the mirror: you are LarryTimeBandit.

I can’t give ol’ Larry the respect of thinking he planned his intellectual dishonesty, partly because he’s clearly unable to form a rational thought, and partly because if he really were a Time Bandit he could probably do something about the fact that his cause has been tainted by the senseless deaths of thousands of people. I mean, if I were a gun festishist and a Time Bandit, I’d be spending my downtime going back in time to re-route the Adam Lanzas of the world to less dangerous insanity. Maybe teach them how to play a musical instrument or, better, how to join the ranks of Gun Loving Time Bandits Against the Senseless Death of America’s Childred. Larry doesn’t do that, so I’m going to assume he is rationally challenged, likes guns, eats steak, and never got around to sentence diagrams school.

You, however–since you’ve made it through about 1,000 words of this missive on killin’—probably have the ability to think before you speak.

You have the ability to know that it’s incredibly disingenuous to equate the premeditated murder of dozens of people with the carelessness of a driver on I-85.

You know that it’s incredibly disingenuous to equate an addiction epidemic propped up by American corporations with a kid stealing one of his dad’s AR-15s, making a list, checking it twice, posting it on Instagram, and then killing as many people as he can.

Hell, if you really stopped and thought about it for longer than an NRA commercial, you might also be able to admit that someone with 1,000 bullets, several extended clips, and a semi-automatic weapon outfitted with a bump stock can kill lots more people at a time than a guy who has to reload every few shots.

Listen, I hear your genuine arguments. Taking all guns away from Americans is a non-starter. America has the 2^nd Amendment. You’re never going to get every gun. Hunting is an American tradition. Target shooting is fun. There are bad people who want to kill us and we have to protect ourselves. Cool. We can work with those.

What we can’t work with, however, is your insistence that because there are capybaras and anacondas in the world that we must also give everyone a pet Grizzly Bear and let them take it to school with them.

Because that would just be stupid, right?

What we’re talking about here is a matter of efficiency. You put an anaconda in a classroom, it’s probably gonna take at least one person out, and that would be a tragedy we would have to address. Mrs. Maples is no longer allowed to have an anaconda as a class pet. Sorry.

But after Sir Snake choked out one kid, Mrs. Maples and her third graders are either going to wrestle that son of a bitch into submission or…I dunno, casually walk to the gymnasium and ask Coach Slotboom to deal with the snake in Room 237.

But you put a Grizzly in a classroom, you’re going to have a whole bunch of dead kids, and you’re going to have a lot of moms asking, “Why did you let a Grizzly in my classroom? Why are you selling Grizzlies at Cabelas? Why is the marching band auctioning off a Grizzly? I’d demand an answer, but I’m currently being mauled by a Grizzly my kid won at a travel baseball game.”

Grizzly Bears are efficient killers. Anacondas are not. It’s why SWAT teams and military fighters carry the Grizzly Bear of weapons: they are the easiest and most efficient way to kill the enemy. You don’t bring a knife to a gunfight, and you don’t bring a snake to war.

You have perhaps convinced yourself that all deadly weapons are equal. Maybe you let your neighbor spout the statistic the car wrecks kill as many people as guns do every year and didn’t bother to ask him how many of those car deaths were premeditated murder and how many were Laney Tottenhaus checking her Snapchat on the way through a red light. That’s fine. Ignorance is bliss, and, as a bonus, really damned bloody apparently.

Maybe you heard about a wackjob with a machete who carved up a few people on the street. Terrible story. Did you hear the one about the guy who purchased as many bullets and guns as he wanted, camped out in a resort hotel, and shot hundreds of people before anyone had a chance to say, “I’m glad I paid my NRA dues. Am I right or am I right?”

Or, if you are too dull to deal with a way-too-extended metaphor, let me try this one on you: if you want gun control advocates to listen to you, you have to prove you are smarter than this false equivalence and you have to prove you can debate with intellectual honesty. Otherwise you aren’t part of the discussion anymore. You are just a robot soldier in a dullard army of a well-funded enemy that doesn’t care how many kids die as long as the money keeps flowing as fast as the blood.

*

There will be those who have read this far and think, “Well, yeah, the Grizzly is bad, but that Gorilla is pretty bad ass, too, and, if I’m reading Brad right here, the Gorilla is the cars, drugs, and steak knives. So, maybe he’s the one who needs a little education. Brad wants to ban steak knives!”

Lest you walk away and try to parrot this like a list of NRA talking points, let me make it clear: your car, your drugs, and your fucking steak knife are not the Silverback Gorilla.

The Gorilla is the Grizzly with a dozen fewer bullets. Your steak knife is the 17 rats.

And your kid…well, he’s the man with the spear…except he doesn’t have a spear and you’re flooding the streets with Grizzly Bears.

Good luck with that bracket, kid. You’re never making it out of the first round.

Other posts from Rapid Eye Reality:

• This lamp fell on my baby’s head yesterday. Baby=f…
• Baby steps

Content originally appeared at Rapid Eye Reality by author Brad Willis.

Copyright © 2012
This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only.
The use of this feed on other websites breaches copyright. If this content is not in your news reader, it makes the page you are viewing an infringement of the copyright.
See the comments on this post

The post The Grizzly Ate Your Baby first appeared on Rapid Eye Reality.

I have to imagine all of that, because I never lived it like my parents did.

Those stories belonged to one or both of them at some time in their childhoods as they lived—as part of their everyday lives—a kind of poverty I wouldn’t come close to believing until I was well into adulthood.

I don’t hold up these stories as a point of pride or to, as some people have suggested about the fortunate and ashamed class to which I belong, “out-poor” anyone who has struggled through real poverty. I only re-imagine those stories I learned over the years to remind myself one thing: that’s where I’m from.

*

My family lived relatively modestly through most of my childhood, a fact that I wouldn’t fully appreciate until much later in my life. There were many times I would lie awake at night and worry that we would lose our house. That fear was probably unfounded, but it was as real for me as the burglars that ripped open our stuffed animals and the Dobermans that chased me down the street.

It was a strange evolution from my grandparents’ dust bowl dirt-farming struggles. The picture above is family just two generations before mine, dressed in their absolute best to honor the dead, knowing they are lucky to still be breathing themselves. They didn’t have to worry about having almost nothing, because that’s what they had already.

As my parents worked to build and build over the top of their childhoods, I’d occasionally find myself in my dad’s car as he slipped off one of the main roads in our town. He’d hang a right and then another right, and suddenly we’d be in a different world, one of ramshackle houses, tired-eyed people, and dust where grass should be. There was desperation there, people who clung as hard as they could to their pride—the last thing they truly had. Even that pride seemed like it could be repossessed at any moment.

I asked my dad once why he would drive us down that street we didn’t have to be on. I wish I could remember his exact words as well as I could remember the lesson. In any case, the sentiment was always clear: not everybody is as lucky as us.

And how well do I remember those drives? I couldn’t tell you exactly how to get to the houses of girls I dated or to the infamous Snider’s Bridge where everyone went to fight, but I found that one street via Google Maps in a matter of ten seconds without knowing its name. Why? Because it’s part of where I’m from, too.

*

A recent dispatch from the West Wing informed us that the man we call President wondered aloud why America would want people from (and pardon me for using Presidential language for a moment) “shithole countries.”

As a nation, we were either aghast, head-shakingly disappointed, or in the case of the true believers, inspired by the man who once again was “telling it like it is.” There is no talking to the last of those, because they’ve already forgotten that their benevolent leader believed no less than 18 months ago that they—those miners from West Virginia, those farmers in Mississippi, those unemployed and opioid addicted in some Tennessee holler—were people from a shithole country, too.

Nevertheless, we all once again tried to account for how the man who serves as the jowly face of our nation could so badly represent how the rest of us feel. Are we as a nation meant to believe that people from Africa, El Salvador, and Haiti are less worthy of our good fortune simply because of where they born? Would we, as the suggestion went, be better off using our wealth and resources to help those Nordic-white faces of Norway?

Well, as far as the man we elected is concerned, the answer is an unwavering “you betcha.” For anyone who has ever had the education of traveling outside the United States, or better, coming to know and love people who did not grow up in America, the idea that we would discount a person’s worth based on where they are from is unthinkable. For the man engaged in an Oval Office sit-in, however, where a person is from is one of the most important things about them.

I’ve been incredibly fortunate to visit some of the places the leader of his free world believes to be shitholes. I’ve seen entire towns of dirt streets in Argentina where dogs trail behind old men with shopping carts full of butcher’s scraps, Brazilian favelas built into the side of a highway, and Ghanaian slums where children are so hungry for food they line up for a juice box and then are so grateful for that love, they offer their juice as thanks.

For the chieftain executive and his legions, where a person is from actually has very little to do with a map. If you listen very closely, you’ll hear what they are really saying: the shitholes are places where people don’t already have opportunity, places where people are poor, places where people are not white, and places where people don’t speak English. You may hear him say the names of other countries and continents, but he’s speaking about large swatches of America at the same time.

And hey, you may not realize it yet, but there is a damned good chance he’s talking about you. You know why? Because I know he’s talking about me.

*

It’s more than disingenuous to look around at where we are now and assign a moral equivalence to who we are. It’s prideful, and if you believe pride is a sin, then you can do the math.

I’ll take pride in any work I’ve put in, but I know I wouldn’t have woken up in a nice suburban cul-de-sac this morning if it hadn’t been for my parents, grandparents, and the people before them who worked their hands bloody. I would never have had the luxury of living in this Greenville, SC suburb if not for the struggles and sacrifices my ancestors made in the Carolinas, Alabama, Tennessee, and Texas. They watched children die, battled addictions, worked jobs that would never make them rich, and kept walking forward. And you know what? They had it easy compared to every family that tried to navigate America as a minority at any point in our history. My people—by and large—were lily white, and that was one hell of a passport.

The only way I’ll ever earn that head start is if I remember it and learn from it. The only way I’ll earn that head start is if I refuse to let anyone who lived as my ancestors did—or in many cases worse—be treated as if where they are from defines who they are and what they are worth.

The America that makes me a proud American is the America that recognizes we would not be who we are but for the people who came from everywhere else. If we are exceptional in any way it’s that we embrace the idea that being lucky enough to be born in America is neither a moral virtue nor anything that’s been earned. The only way we’ll remain true to this country’s core values and earn the good luck we have is if we refuse to let our despots convince those of feebler minds that geography, wealth, and good fortune are prerequisites for our compassion, security, and opportunity.

In 2018 America, I can scan through all of Google maps and see the neighborhoods of El Salvador, the open-air schools in Ghana, the streets of Flint Michigan, and the neighborhood Dad drove me through when I was ten years old. I can see poverty and struggle and know it doesn’t define the people who are living it. The hearts and minds of the people make up a place—not the other way around—and if you need any evidence of that, I can point you to the best example of a shithole available today. Just type 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue into your browser. Google will do the rest.

—-

Suggested reading: If this is a topic you’d like to explore a little more in depth, I’d recommend Part 4 of the massive essay Bubbles written by a friend of mine.

Other posts from Rapid Eye Reality:

• Working man
• In case of emergency

Content originally appeared at Rapid Eye Reality by author Brad Willis.

Copyright © 2012
This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only.
The use of this feed on other websites breaches copyright. If this content is not in your news reader, it makes the page you are viewing an infringement of the copyright.
See the comments on this post

The post Atlas mugged first appeared on Rapid Eye Reality.

I can’t imagine a tighter group of friends. At any given time, we had four or five guys living in the three-bedroom condo and a like number of young women who lived in the other half. We hosted massive parties, gathered for relaxed “Corona & Lime Thursdays,” and engaged in a three-year game of “Look At My Ass.”

This is to say, not everyone had seen each other naked (yet), but it was getting close to that point when the Ice Cream Incident happened.

Richard (I’m changing his name, because he remains one of my best friends and is now a respected member of his community) loved his ice cream. He was generous with booze. He was our best cook and was just as generous with his time in the kitchen.

His ice cream was off limits.

Our fridge was like any other college fridge. Mustard. Leftover China Kitchen containers. Two shelves of beer. Something left behind by the previous residents. On a good night, somebody’s underpants.

The freezer, however, is where Richard kept his ice cream.

I can remember exactly where I was sitting on the day Richard decided that we had been stealing bites of his ice cream. We had a ratty old L-shaped sectional couch that should have eventually been donated to a forensics lab for further study. I was on one end of it as Richard opened the freezer in the kitchen and looked at all of us in front of our game of Madden.

I don’t remember what words he used, but we all looked up as he took out the half-gallon of ice cream. He was holding a giant serving spoon, and he used it to take a tennis-ball-sized clump of ice cream out of the container. He shoved it all in his mouth at once and waited just long enough for the man-sized-bite to soak in his DNA. He made sure we were all still watching.

And then he spit the entire wad back into the ice cream. He gave it a little stir, put the container back in the freezer, and walked away. Even if he’d made the ice cream a little worse for himself, he guaranteed it was forever ruined for everyone else.

No security deposit could ever account for what happened in that house. An angry girlfriend once threw a beer bottle across the entire house and shattered the oven door glass. There was also a large and very dark stain on the carpet which you couldn’t miss. The rest of the carpet was far from clean, but the stain stood out like a sore thumb. This was a job for the experts like Martin’s Carpet Cleaning Company, who offer Maidenhead carpet cleaning services, but it would even challenge them. Frankie–in response to the stain on the carpet–famously looked at it, turned his beer can upside down until he’d emptied it on the rug, and remarked, “Screw it. It’s a rental.” When I totaled my car, my friends carried the bumper home and left it in front of the fireplace for months until we bribed the trash man with a 12-pack of beer to take it away.

We were not people concerned with cleanliness or hygiene, but I’ll tell you this: nobody stole that spitty ice cream.

The older I get, the funnier that story is to me. I look at all of the people who lived there. We remain close, chat often, and travel to ball games together regularly. We love each other like family, and the Ice Cream Incident (like the Point & Poke, Slow Roll Across the Top, & Bacon on the Grill) has become an iconic chapter in the book of Who We Were Then.

I thought about Richard and the Ice Cream Incident this morning as I read about America’s continued slide into the Pit of You’ve Got to Be Kidding Me. It occurred to me as I considered America’s new tax bill, who will ultimately benefit from it, and how the people who helped make it happen-I’m talking to you voters-are likely not among the beneficiaries.

I thought about it as it became clearer that the man we made President is not only ill-suited to be the leader of our country, but also ill-suited to be associated with anything we care to curate for our futures.

It’s hard to think about this. I am not the guy who hates Republicans and conservatives as a rule. I may disagree with them on many points, but they are my brothers and sisters as much as anybody else. I have many, many friends who voted for the Republican candidate in the 2016 election. These are people I love. They are well-meaning, intelligent people who in many respects are much smarter than I’ll ever be. I know, in their hearts, this isn’t working out like they hoped. They saw something in the Democrats to which they’d always been averse, they saw the Republican choice, and they went with their gut.

There are those people who will continue to puff up their chests and proudly wear their MAGA hat, but let’s all be intellectually honest here. Even if you’re a good conservative-no…especially if you’re a good conservative-you are compelled to recognize the damaging effects of this presidency. This is not a philosophical debate. This is not a matter of policy. This isn’t even a moral question anymore. Donald Trump is not going to magically transform himself into Ronald Reagan. He isn’t going to pivot to decency. He will not grow into the role. He will not mature. Intellectually-for those who actually have intellect-everyone knew this from the beginning. There were those who fought against it. There were those who sat by and let it happen. And there were those that grabbed the biggest serving spoon they could find.

I don’t think I need to put too fine a point on it, but I will just because I really want to type these words:

Donald Trump is the ball of spitty ice cream.

A year ago, a bunch of angry people made sure everybody was watching as they spit Trump all over America and declared, “This is mine. Don’t touch it.”

But here’s the thing: any metaphor stretched this far is bound to fall apart, and this one is no exception. That’s the point. See, Richard actually bought that ice cream. It was his to spit in. On that day, he might not have been feeling particularly generous, but in reality, none of us had any claim on his dessert at all.

If I may be so bold, that’s not the case with America.

The people who spit Trump onto us believe in their hearts that this country is theirs. They don’t want to share it with people who are different colors. They don’t want to share it with different creeds. They don’t want to share it with people who grew up in less fortunate circumstances or have not yet been able to pull off an unlikely Horatio Alger story. What’s more, these same spitters are relishing everyone looking at the country and realizing it’s been corrupted to a degree that may have ruined it for generations.

Richard was always more mature than me, but in the two decades since the Ice Cream Incident, he has risen above even the expectations he had for himself. He is a mature, loving, generous, successful man. He remains proud of the Ice Cream Incident, but only because it is the stuff of legend, like Frankie sitting through nine pitchers of beer without getting up to go to the bathroom, me turning a dorm bathroom into a grape Mad Dog 20/20 re-distribution center, or Joey Two-Hands…well, all the things about Joey Two-Hands. The point is, Richard grew up.

America can do the same thing. We can stop pretending we all are having a reasonable disagreement about the President’s fitness for office. We can stop pretending democracy requires we ride this one out. We can stop clinging to the notion that it’s okay to burn down this village in order to save it from the prospect of liberals winning literally anything. We can be statesmen. We can work together at least long enough to save a few generations of Americans and then resume fighting over policy in the same vitriolic fashion we have been for decades.

If you’ve read this far-even in anger–you don’t believe Donald Trump is good for this country. I know this because you’re smart enough to read. I don’t even care if you’re angry or offended by this. I don’t care if you hate me as a result. This isn’t about Republicans vs. Democrats, as far as I am concerned. Republicans and Democrats don’t have to agree on much, but good ones must agree they have to reclaim the America they lost for a few months. This is about patriotism.

All I ask is that you be intellectually honest enough to admit that real patriots won’t sit by and trade their country’s morality for a couple of political wins. Real patriots won’t be led by the nose into Us vs. Them battles created in the hands of a propped-up madman in the West Wing. Real patriots will defend their country not only from foreign enemies but from the people who seek to destroy the nation and its ideals from the inside. You may hate liberals. You may hate your neighbors. You may be afraid that what’s yours could be given to somebody else. Fine. Fight them all if you want. But don’t lie to yourself and say what your president is doing to America is worth it. You’re smarter than that.

Right? You’re smarter than people who actively deride science as fake news. You’re smarter than people who believe widespread voter fraud exists. You’re smarter that believing it’s okay to overlook sexual abuse for the sake of politics. You’re smarter than the people who believe the America’s oldest journalistic institutions are a cabal to undermine democracy.

Right? I mean, ask yourself honestly: are journalists who have worked their entire lives in search of the truth suddenly working as part of a conspiracy to tell lies in an attempt to overthrow Trump? Or is it possible they are publishing bad stories about Trump because he has done bad things? Now, ask yourself, if it’s the latter, what damage could result from the leader of the free world declaring the fourth estate-among the last checks in our checks and balances system-to be fraudulent? He’s already declared Congress to be corrupt. He’s declared the courts to be corrupt. He’s telling you that the only branch of American government you can trust…is him.

Are you smart enough to recognize that? Are you smart enough to recognize that this isn’t just politics and that undermining the foundation of America’s entire system is going to have destructive and lasting implications?

Overlook for a moment that everything is messed up and that we’re supposed to be in two warring camps. Ask yourself if you can look at people like me and know we’re not out to destroy your ideals or asking you to give up your true beliefs. Ask yourself if you can look at people like me and know we still love you and respect you. I know many of you-even most of you-didn’t want things to turn out like this. I know you would change it if you could.

And that’s what this is about. Making the change where we can.

If you can do that– if you can look at all of the above and admit to yourself that you are smart enough to recognize those things–then you have a patriotic obligation to acknowledge it. I know it won’t be easy. I know it will feel like you’re sleeping with the enemy. But ask yourself, if you put God above country and country above party, and your party’s leader is working contrary to both your country and your God, then what does your support-tacit or not-indicate about you and your real beliefs?

I know what it says. And if you’re smart, you do, too.

So, pick a side. You’re not bound to where you sit. Pick a side now. Your patriotism can be saved with one sentence: “I am a proud American, and I won’t support anyone who supports Donald Trump.”

If you have that kind of courage, you can call yourself a patriot.

Otherwise, you’re not spitting in your own ice cream. You’re spitting in America’s ice cream.

And guess what? If you keep doing it, the only cold dessert you’re going to have is the collection of faux-patriot snowflakes Trump cobbled together for a quickie in 2016.

And that shit melts faster than you think.

Other posts from Rapid Eye Reality:

• Back on American soil. Would like to take a nap on…
• I watched Recount instead of American Idol last ni…

Content originally appeared at Rapid Eye Reality by author Brad Willis.

Copyright © 2012
This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only.
The use of this feed on other websites breaches copyright. If this content is not in your news reader, it makes the page you are viewing an infringement of the copyright.
See the comments on this post

The post American Just Desserts first appeared on Rapid Eye Reality.

That’s what Linda told me one spring day around lunch time as she thought back to the little details of the last time she saw her daughter Charity alive. On a normal day, Charity would have been begging for caffeine before heading out to work. Instead, she was sipping stale leftover coffee from her favorite Starbucks cup.

“I thought ‘Oh, no, she is drinking day-old coffee,” Linda said. “I had had pneumonia, and that night had been the first night I had been able to sleep without sitting up. I had a pounding headache, so I did not fix fresh coffee.”

Charity didn’t ask for any. She didn’t ask her mother to pray with her as she usually did. She was dead by the end of the day.

What started as an abnormal morning became nearly decade of tragedy compounded with tragedy, a cold case left unsolved, and Linda dead in a hotel room.

Charity Worley died nine years ago last Sunday. She left her house to warm up her car on a cold December North Carolina morning. Somebody was waiting. They beat her nearly to death and left her under her 4Runner.

It happened in Hendersonville, about an hour north of where I live. I was already out of the news business by that point, but I never shook whatever it was that made mysteries like Charity’s so compelling. Only a couple of days passed before I was watching a local newscast that opened with a voice screaming, “Oh, God!” over and over again. It was the kind of scream that tore at your stomach. I couldn’t believe the TV station had used the 911 tape from that morning at Charity’s house. I wrote an essay about it. A few weeks later, Linda found the essay online. It wasn’t long after that, Linda started to confide in me.

Linda and Charity’s life was anything but normal. Linda had a neuromuscular condition that required frequent therapy. Charity’s husband was a private military contractor living in Iraq. Charity had a 15-month-old baby. Her sister needed a place to live. So, they all moved in together and called themselves the Three Musketeers. They each saved text messages that read “All for one and one for all.”

Their lives had not been perfect. They each had their problems, some of which were public, some of which were not. There were secrets the media didn’t discover. Some were tawdry. Some were merely sad. They were real life. Linda spent her days and nights wondering if those darker problems led to her daughter’s murder.

A year passed, and investigators found nothing they admitted in public. They said Charity had been beaten to death with a pipe, but other than that, nothing had turned up.

In the meantime, Linda had turned herself into an amateur investigator. She tracked down a man she believed had motive to kill, a man who had power over Charity, a man she hounded in every way she knew. She finally resorted to long Facebook messages, some of which she forwarded me. I have no way of knowing whether the man’s responses to her were real, but Linda said they were.

“I am sure her beauty and poise attracted you like a shark to blood,” Linda wrote. “You preyed on her.”

According to what Linda forwarded, the man begged her to leave him out of it for the sake of his kids, writing “Its (sic) for them I live.”

Linda developed several suspects on her own, all of which sounded–at least in her telling–like viable paths of investigation. If she had mentioned any of them in public, she might have been sued. Or she might have caught the killer.

Regardless, deputies had something else in mind.

A few weeks after Linda told me about her suspect, she sent me a message.

“Yesterday my son, my daughter, and I were interviewed by the SBI.”

The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation had pulled them all in for interviews. Linda at first thought she had reason to be hopeful. She thought the case had gone cold and that investigators had given up. Instead, the investigators had turned their focus to Linda’s family, specifically Charity’s sister.

Linda said the agents had shoved photos of Charity’s shaved head in front of her sister Lindsey, and according to Linda, worked to get Lindsey to confess. Distraught, Linda came to realize no one was coming to ease her tragedy. They were only going to compound it.

“There are no more cruel or meaner people alive than the SBI,” Linda told me.

*

Linda set out on a crusade, one that would eventually end her. She wrote elected officials. She wrote her son-in-law’s government contractor employer. She wrote angry letters, one of which got published on the internet calling an SBI agent “the most unethical cruel and meanest man I have ever met in my life.”

Though Linda found people who would sympathize with her, her crusade did nothing to ingratiate herself with investigators. Their focus intensified. They hired a South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED) profiler who held a news conference and, for all intents and purposes, pointed the finger at Linda’s family.

“The offender will live within an extremely close proximity of the residence at 1004 W. Gilbert St. (the crime scene) at the time of the crime…extremely close,” the profiler said.

Linda came to realize, perhaps too slowly, that she was doing herself no favors. Detectives pushed even harder. Linda told me they tried every investigative trick they could find, including convincing her they were going to arrest Lindsey, and then asking her to write a statement saying Lindsey had been suffering from postpartum depression.

“They could sway public opinion,” she said they tried to convince her.

Linda wrote no statement. Lindsey was not arrested. No one was arrested then, and no one has been arrested since.

Linda poured through her daughter’s emails. She used Charity’s email address to continue her personal investigation. She chatted with Charity’s friends and people she believed might actually be Charity’s enemies. Over time, even some people in the public began to turn against her in public forums, including writing unflattering comments and veiled accusations in the comments on this site.

The last time I heard from Linda, she’d found something resembling optimism. She had herself hypnotized. She heard from a new investigator who she said was described as a smart cookie who was going back over every piece of evidence. In the transcript of the investigator’s email Linda saved, he had written that they too were considering having her hypnotized. It read “Take care and we will be talking soon!”

*

On February 6, 2014, a housekeeper opened the door of Linda’s hotel room in Newberry, South Carolina. Linda was there, dead of an overdose that police believed was intentional. They found letters Linda had addressed to loved ones, but nothing in those letters offered any insight into what happened to her daughter. Cops from another county said Linda was connected to an identity theft investigation at the time of her death.

From what I knew of Linda, I would never have expected her to kill herself, but the only Linda I knew was the one hellbent on finding whoever killed her daughter. There were other Lindas, to be sure, and one of them committed suicide a little more than five years after somebody murdered her daughter.

The profession I chose and the path I took crossed paths with just about every sort of grieving parent. It was barely possible to witness any of their grief, but the worst by far were the parents who never knew what happened to their children. They all shared a similar pain, but they dealt with it differently.

I can still recall the stoic resolve on the faces of Warren and Debbie Holsonback as they waited for investigators to find the evidence against the men they believed killed their daughter.

I remember Jason Knapp’s mother, Deborah, taking us to Table Rock State Park with a psychic in the hopes she could find her son.

I remember the mom who contacted me last week asking me to look into the 2002 death of her daughter, one police ruled an accident.

And I remember Linda.

Holsonback’s parents counted on investigators. Knapp’s mom sought help in a psychic. Linda threw herself into her own crusade and ran right into an investigation of her own family.

If you asked me what I believe about Linda, I’d say I don’t think she knew who killed her daughter. Her grief turned into some questionable decisions, and she made enemies of some of the people who were trying to help her. As much as she tried to help herself, she ended up doing the opposite. I’d like to say I would have handled it differently than she did, but I’m not sure I would have. In fact, I’m pretty sure I would’ve made some of the same mistakes she did.

But if you asked me not what I believe but instead what I know, I’d say this: not much. I barely knew Linda. I didn’t know Charity at all. I only know that Charity died nine years ago this week, and the killer has gotten away with it so far.

And, as unsatisfying as that is, that’s it.

There is nothing comforting about a story ending without a resolution. It leaves an empty space in your brain that requires, if not justice, at least an answer. Nine years later, we still have a remote chance at seeing both.

Linda died with neither, just as lost as she had been that morning in 2008 and in enough pain that she couldn’t conceive of the story ending on its own.

So she did it herself.

Other posts from Rapid Eye Reality:

• Charity Worley: One year gone
• New blog post: Charity Worley: One year gone http:…
• Charity Worley killed with pipe

Content originally appeared at Rapid Eye Reality by author Brad Willis.

Copyright © 2012
This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only.
The use of this feed on other websites breaches copyright. If this content is not in your news reader, it makes the page you are viewing an infringement of the copyright.
See the comments on this post

The post Charity Worley: Tragedy compounded first appeared on Rapid Eye Reality.

That’s what I’ve learned to become in my four decades on this planet. I was taught to feel pride. I was taught to feel exceptional. I was taught to feel lucky to have been born in the greatest country on Earth.

I learned instead to be skeptical.

This is a hard thing to learn for a romantic. When everyone from your grandfather to your preacher to the guys who announce the football games teach you the same thing about your country, skepticism doesn’t come easy. Pro tip: it’s easier to wash down with a healthy shot of cynicism.

So, that’s what I downed—no chaser—before departing for Freedom Day a few weeks ago. I rolled up to the elementary school drunk on 140 proof skepticism cut with a toxic dose of the last 12 months in America.

I’ve been to a lot of these things with the kids. There is always a flag. Many of the songs are the ones I was taught when I was in school. We’re meant to walk out with our patriotic hearts aflutter.

My eight-year-old was on stage and seemed less uncomfortable than I was when he walked to the front and led the Pledge of Allegiance in front of a couple hundred adults. He said every word just as he was taught. He joined his classmates on the risers, and they began to sing. Their voices cracked when they hit the high notes in “sweet land of liberty.” I hoped my neighbors in the crowd were watching the kids close enough that they didn’t see me knocking tears out of my eyes.

Anyone would have forgiven me for being overcome with emotion as our sweet American children raised their voices in honor of our country. Unfortunately, that wasn’t why I needed forgiveness.

I felt the tears at the very same moment I looked at all of the kids nervously honoring their country. All I could think was, “My God, they have no idea, do they?”

*

I am past the point I wake up feeling certain I know what is going to happen in America.

That point was probably September 11, 2001, but I’ve been reminded of it many times since then. Over the past year, the reminder comes almost every day. I never know what it’s going to be. Dorothy Parker’s “What fresh hell is this?” was meant to be funny, but in 2017 I can’t laugh without shaking my head.

I don’t have the time to list it all, but you don’t need me to. Every day, it’s something new, and it’s almost always terrible. Today, for instance, an alleged child molester in Alabama stands a good chance of being elected to the United States Senate. Why?

You will hear a lot of reasons. Because tax reform is more important than our basic moral code. Because he was backed by his party’s national committee. Because the President of the United States endorsed him. Because no jury has ever convicted him. Because those women took too long to come forward. Because she wouldn’t have dressed that way if she didn’t want it. Because better a pedophile than a Democrat.

Because.

The real reason? Because this country isn’t what we say it is. It isn’t the stuff we sang about in school. We can pretend it is. We can stretch a flag from end zone to end zone. We can tell people to love this country or leave it. We can send the bravest of us to other countries to die for a concept we pretend to honor. But none of that is what we say it is.

We pretend quite a bit. Right now, there are still people pretending that what’s happening in this country is normal. They are pretending that the fresh hell of every morning—the massacres, the scandals, the greed, the destruction of our most basic ideals—is the most normal thing in the world. If you question them, you are invited to have sex with yourself, leave the country, or both. Preferably both.

We’re supposed to believe that this is normal and that if we feel any differently, it’s probably just the mainstream media corrupting our brains. If we feel differently, it’s because we’re hypocrites who don’t look deep enough inside ourselves to find our own true corruption. If we feel differently, we’re not real capital P Patriots. We are supposed to wake up every morning, wrap ourselves in a flag and say, “I am lucky to be here!”

The divide in this country isn’t between north and south, rich and poor, Republicans and Democrats. The divide in this country is between the people who think what’s happening in our country is normal and the people who are terrified that it someday will be.

*

When my kid asked to have his picture taken after the Freedom Day celebration, I didn’t hesitate. When he insisted on being in front of the giant flag, I didn’t try to argue. Why?

Because he and his friends had not only sung the old hits. They’d also sung new songs, ones that talked about the value of immigrants in our country, ones that honored different cultures and ideas. During one section, my kid had again walked to the front of the stage and spoke about Harriet Tubman with the same reverence as anyone would have spoken about any other American hero.

What’s more, the crowd of kids around the flag had more than white southern faces. They were Indian, Chinese, and Mexican. They were little men and women who respected each other as equals. They still loved their country because when they looked around their classroom, their country looked beautiful, inclusive, and everything we pretend it really is. They could honestly honor that flag and deserved to have their pictures taken in front of it.

I value my childhood. It was ideal in almost every respect. Still, I look back on how often my education in and out of school focused on what I should believe about everything, and I wonder how different life might have been if I didn’t have to wake up as an adult and realize the fairy tales I heard went far beyond Hansel and Gretel.

The innocence that lets children love and respect each other is the same one that let me see past the horrors and corruption that surrounded me when I was young. That’s probably a healthy thing, but today I’ve come to feel I shouldn’t push it any farther than that. It will be hard enough for my kids to face America’s truths without also looking back at their childhood and wondering if their old man was lying to them or just stupid.

Put another way, I’m not going to tell my kids this is normal. It’s not normal that more than 500 people can be shot at a concert and it’s all but forgotten in a couple of months. It’s not normal to ban people from coming to our country based on their religion. It’s not normal for the leader of our country to taunt other world leaders with playground insults. No matter how upside down and terrible our country’s history has been, there is nothing normal about what’s happening right now.

And if this is normal, then everything you’ve ever thought about America is a lie.

*

So, yes, I’m past the point I wake up knowing deep in my heart that we’re all going to be okay. I’m past the point of believing we’re all in this together. I’m past the point of looking at the world through naïve eyes that lie better than any Washington D.C. lifer. I am past the point at which I look at a whipping rectangle of red, white, and blue and feel nothing but pride. Who in their right mind could still be so stirred by colors that they well up with joy?

“Daddy!’

The little guy had pulled on his coat this morning to wait for his ride for school. He was looking out the front window while I cut crusts off a sandwich and tried to remember if I’d actually put anything between the bread.

“Daddy!”

“What!”

It wasn’t even a question, because I knew what. The dog had eaten something. Somebody had spilled syrup on his pants. There was a meteor careening toward Earth and we’re all doomed. The President had spoken disrespectfully about a woman again. Voters were having a hard time deciding between a Democrat and an alleged sex offender. Everything is corrupt and a lie. Who has to ask “what” when the answer almost never matters anyway?

“Daddy! The sunrise. Look!”

It was purple and pink. It was orange and yellow. It was rising again in the east as, I’m told, it does every day. Some days it’s harder to see. There are dark clouds. There’s smoke, and storms, and hate, and bias, and bigotry, and greed, and lies, and fear, and abuse, and harassment, and line upon line up line that we draw and cross and draw and cross and draw and cross until we’re a country inside an Escher sketch inside some random Dali brush stroke inside a box we built for ourselves so we could set everything inside on fire.

“Daddy! Look!”

Maybe we’re the fire line. Maybe we corrupted and tired adults are scorching our own ground to save those who will come behind us. Maybe this is what it takes to reset. I don’t put much stock in hope these days, but that is a hope I’ll hold onto: that each time we shoot our ideals into a dark sky and blow them out of the blackness with a shotgun we call Normal America, we are at the same time saving a generation of little women and men who can still look up at a random assortment of colors and feel their hearts swell.

I stood there with my little boy on the front porch looking at the few perfect seconds of watercolor magic. His smile was genuine, unblemished by anything that may happen in Alabama, Washington D.C., or anywhere other than that eastern sky.

And I felt it, too, for just those couple of minutes on the porch as I saw the color and wonder swirling in his eyes. It’s the same sun that will rise over Russia, Ghana, England, and Alabama. No matter where you live, you wake up under that sun, the same one my son appreciated for every spark of its glory.

Looking at the sunrise and seeing my son smile, I could stop for just long enough to think of my short time on this planet with a little boy who still believes in the goodness of people and the hope of our future.

I could, at least for that moment, think, “We’re lucky to be here.”

Other posts from Rapid Eye Reality:

• I don’t remember the last time I willingly woke up…
• I have now seen the sunrise 3x this week (10x this…
• This is about to be July’s sunrise #11. Apropos of…

Content originally appeared at Rapid Eye Reality by author Brad Willis.

Copyright © 2012
This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only.
The use of this feed on other websites breaches copyright. If this content is not in your news reader, it makes the page you are viewing an infringement of the copyright.
See the comments on this post

The post American sunrise first appeared on Rapid Eye Reality.

“Well, hello,” he said. He looked almost mischievous through the screen door between us.

“Good morning!” I said. The look in his eye made me sure he was hoping I’d ask, so I did.

“How are they going to hold up against the Hurricanes Saturday?”

I was standing in a carport that could only be described as shrine. If you looked past an old truck with a flat tire and the random detritus of a life well lived, you’d see little but orange. If everyone could find something in their life that gave them as much joy as the Clemson Tigers give Mr. John, I’m not sure we’d have to worry about most of the things that bother us today.

He opened the screen door and looked as confident as I’d ever seen him.

“We’re going to beat them by 14 points,” he said. It was definitive. Not a question in his mind.

“I’m going to hold you to that,” I said, handing him his food and milk through the door, hoping the Tigers could give him another win. Neither of us expected the 38-3 rout Clemson put on Miami, but when it happened, I thought first of Mr. John.

I would’ve liked to stay longer, but Mugs was waiting. And you don’t keep Mugs waiting. Trust me on this one.

*

I started delivering food for Meals on Wheels at the end of the summer. It wasn’t anything I talked about with anyone at first. I signed up before even talking to my wife about it. After a period of time where I’d struggled to appreciate the many joys of my life, I woke one day with a sense of gratitude that only comes from having forgotten the concept completely. I signed up for Meals on Wheels before getting out of bed, and a couple of weeks later I’d been through an orientation and had my first route.

You’ve probably heard of the operation. Meals on Wheels prepares and delivers food for people who can’t get out to get it for themselves. It’s one hot lunch and something to drink every weekday. For a lot of the people Meals on Wheels serves, that lunch is the only hot meal they will have all day.

The operation is almost entirely run by volunteers. What’s more, Meals on Wheels is one of the top-rated charities. More than 90% of the donations it receives go to the people the organization serves. You won’t find many charities with that kind of record.

That is all well and good, but I’d be lying if I said I knew that before I showed up. I just woke up one day and realized I wasn’t doing something I should be doing. That doesn’t happen very often, so when it does, I listen.

I don’t know exactly what I was expecting to come out of it, but I know it wasn’t what happened on Thursday at the end of my route.

*

Ms. Deborah wasn’t home, and that was disappointing. She likes me, and I like her. She’s among the spriest people I see on my delivery day, and she never fails to make me smile. When I’m off, she notices, and always tells me she missed me. The week after I brought my boys on the route with me, she asked about them and told me how handsome they were.

Ms. Bonnie had her floors redone, and she was proud. Things hadn’t been going well in recent months, and she’d confided in me about some trouble she was facing. She always asked me to say a prayer for her. On Thursday, though, her floors were shiny, and she promised to give me the name of the man who installed them for her.

Ms. Betty’s newspaper was still hanging from her door. She didn’t seem interested in it, but she told me she’d take it anyway. She’s the quietest person on my route. If I put her in a story, she’d be a librarian.

I was making good time, which was a surprise based on the fact that I’d had to double back to my house twice, once to get my drink, and once to get the stuff I promised I’d bring for Mugs.

See, the thing I like about Thursdays is that-no matter what kind of day I’m having, how busy I am, how terrible things seem in the world-there are people who count on me to show up. They will go hungry if I don’t. They are always grateful. Every one of them. It’s trite to say I’m getting more out of it than they are, but it’s only trite because it’s so often true.

And on this Thursday, I’d made a promise to Mugs. As my sons know: a Willis keeps his promise.

*

I was not good at first. Not at all.

When I picked up my meals, I struggled to contain them all. I was on my hands and knees, sweating in a church parking lot, a 43-year old man looking like a freshman trying to zip his overfull backpack. The directions are all on paper, laid out for the most efficient possible route, which is great unless it’s your first day, you’re wracked with anxiety, and you’re driving a giant pick-up truck. Anyone watching would’ve thought I started the day drinking early.

Driving a pick-up truck is hard at the best of times, let alone when you don’t know where you’re going. This can cause panic, as pick-up trucks are big vehicles and the responsibility is on you to keep people safe. Luckily, a lot of business-owned vehicles like trucks have advanced driver assistance systems (adas) from companies like Lytx to keep them safe and in control. I must try to remember not to spend all of my time looking at the directions, as if I do that, I am more than likely to cause a trucking accident. These are big vehicles and if they collide with a car that is considerably smaller, the consequences could be fatal. And I would be wracked with guilt if I knew that I had injured somebody through my reckless actions. So before I set off, I will give myself as much time as I need to understand exactly where I’m going. This doesn’t do anything for my nerves though. I also spent a while reading articles like these Carlypso liner reviews to learn more about the accessories I might need for the trip. I bought a new bed liner kit and some new wheels to prepare for the trip.

At each door, I looked up, not sure what I’d see but hoping it was an answer to some burning question that I didn’t even know how to ask. Instead, I realized that each of the people who answered were mirrors to my anxiousness. I’d eventually learn that mirror would remain true when I was bursting with gratitude as well, but on the first day I wondered if I’d made a mistake.

On that first day, I showed up to Ms. Dixie’s house. Her storm door was closed, but her front door was open. Through the glass, her TV was tuned to CBS. The chyron at the bottom of the screen read: “Barcelona Terror Attack.” I stood there sweating through my clothes. I was supposed to be in Barcelona at that very moment, but I’d chosen to stay home while my friends went to work. They were all within a mile or so of the attack. I left her front porch worrying about my friends and just wanting to be back inside my house.

That was the day I met Mugs. Weighing in at about 12 pounds, Mugs protects the whole of Ms. Helen’s domain. He’s a little white terrier with a black leather collar and a sonic bark that could shatter glass.

On that first day, I tried to calm him down by saying, “It’s okay, puppy.”

“Oh, he’s no puppy,” Ms. Helen corrected. In her voice was something implied, something about none of us being young anymore, something about how we’ll all have to go sometime. She seemed resigned, but, at the same time grateful I’d taken a knee to rub her dog’s head.

And so it came to be that no matter how my day was going, no matter what was happening, I’d get to see Mugs and Ms. Helen at the end of my route. That kept me going.

*

I got better. The guy who brought the food to the church parking lot started to remember my name. He asked about the Little League sticker on my truck, and he was better at shooting the bull than just about anybody I’d see on any given day.

I got friendly with one client’s in-home nurse. The client just turned 90 and has been a widower for the past year. His in-home nurse is nearly retired herself and working for peanuts, but she went to church with the old guy and has a caretaker’s affection. She makes sure his rose bushes stay pruned and watered. She’s probably the best human being I talk to all week long.

Less than a mile away, a client who answered her phone when I called told me she was sick at the hospital, but her friend would receive her meal for her at home. When I got there, a man answered the door. I asked about the woman who lived there and if she would be home from the hospital soon. He sighed and shook his head. He cocked his head toward the back of the house, and the implication was clear. The woman thought she was at the hospital, but she’d never left the house. It was dementia, he said. I commiserated, telling him I had a relative suffering from the same thing. He looked past me to nothing in particular and said, “It’s an epidemic.” He paused for a second and finished. “Everything in America. It’s an epidemic.”

That’s the reality of this gig. For every joyful moment, there is a reminder that the people I see have a very hard time ever leaving their homes. They are nearing the end of their lives, and the vast majority of them aren’t going to improve much. I started to worry there would be a day when I showed up and had to accept someone wasn’t coming back.

Some days, when an old woman in a housecoat opens a door to a place that smells of cigarette smoke, it’s a struggle to find the light in her tired eyes. But then she smiles and says, “Thank you.” She doesn’t have to say it, but she means it, and that’s the light, pure and simple.

*

Of all the people on the route, Ms. Helen loved my boys the most. I’d taken them with me when they were on their fall break, and Ms. Helen fell for them. So did Mugs. He barked for just a couple of seconds before sniffing the boys’ hands and calming down. The boys loved Mugs, they loved Ms. Helen’s “Monsters Inc.” jammies, and they loved the entire process. They begged me to take them back at the very next opportunity.

A couple of weeks ago, I showed up to Ms. Helen’s, and I could tell things weren’t right. She told me her daughter was ill, and she looked worried. Worse, Mugs was losing it. He wouldn’t calm down and barked until he sounded hoarse. When he finally gave up, Ms. Helen looked down at him.

“You know what? I think he misses your boys,” she said.

I don’t know why, exactly, but that was the moment for me, the one where I felt the most human connection I’d felt in a long time. The old woman barely knew me, but she and her dog had developed an affection for my sons. That’s all it takes for me.

I kneeled down. “Mugs, the boys won’t be back until Christmastime, but I’ll bring you a treat next time I come, okay?”

A Willis keeps his promise. I hoped Mugs knew that.

*

Last week was busy. Both boys had lots of stuff going on before and after school. Work was insane. My other volunteer gig was off the chain. My wife was out working all week. It was a day in which I truly did not have time to be a delivery guy.

That’s why I at first forgot the treats for Mugs and had to double back. I pulled into the food pick-up lot with one minute to spare. Once I was back on the road, things went well. Mr. John gave me the Tigers-Hurricanes tip. Despite thinking I might, I didn’t run out of gas. And I made it to Ms. Helen’s by my normal time.

I sat in my truck for a second trying to decide if either treat I brought for Mugs was appropriate. I had a jerky treat my labs eat, but I worried it was too tough for Mugs’ little jaws. I had a teeth-cleaning bone, but again, it was pretty big for a little dog.

With no other choice, I bounded up the walkway. I had a surprise for Ms. Helen, too. Because Ms. Deborah was gone for the afternoon, I had an extra meal for Ms. Helen. That’s rare, and I was hoping she would be happy with a second helping.

On a route, you come to find patterns: noises to let you know someone is coming to the door, the amount of time it should take for someone to answer, the rattle of an old hand struggling to turn the lock.

On Thursday, I knew something was wrong at Ms. Helen’s almost immediately.

My knuckles on the door weren’t immediately met with Mug’s terror bark. Ms. Helen didn’t answer within ten seconds as she always does. I stood there on the concrete steps looking around at an otherwise beautiful fall day and for about 30 seconds imagining what might have happened. I pictured old Mugs-not a puppy-silent on a sad morning as Ms. Helen realized her last companion was gone, too. I wondered what she would do…or if she would do anything at all without Mugs around.

I was just about to try to find something comforting to say when I heard it: Mugs was in full-on attack mode, claws skittering on the floor, ready for whatever bad guy was at the door. The smile on my face couldn’t have been much bigger when the door opened. Mugs kept his distance with his bark set to eleven. I looked up from him to see a woman I didn’t recognize.

This isn’t uncommon. A lot of clients have caretakers or children who open the door and get their meals for them. That’s why I said almost nothing before kneeling down and breaking off a pea-sized piece of jerky for Mugs. He sniffed it, took it from me, and trotted off to chow down.

I stood and stumbled over my words. “These are for Ms. Helen,” I said. “And I told her I’d bring some treats for Mugs.”

The woman smiled softly and took them from me. “Thank you.”

She waited and looked at me curiously.

“You don’t know what happened, do you?”

I stood on the porch and listened, hardly believing it and at the same time knowing it was true.

The previous week, Ms. Helen had been waiting on her lunch delivery and had decided to step outside to wait.

“He found her right there,” said the woman at the door, looking down to a metal chair on the porch.

Ms. Helen had suffered a stroke in the minutes before her Meals on Wheels driver arrived.

“The doctors said if he’d not come, she probably wouldn’t have made it,” the woman said.

The driver had called an ambulance. It arrived and got her to doctors in time to save her life. She’s still in the hospital and undergoing physical therapy to see if she can return home.

I don’t get attached to people very easily. It’s a function of my time in the news world where everything was terrible all of the time. That’s why I felt so confused there on the steps Thursday, because I realized I was about to cry.

“Tell her…” I started. “Tell her the Meals on Wheels driver with the two sons he brought…tell her the guy who was bringing a treat for Mugs…”

The woman looked at me with kind eyes.

“She’ll know,” she said.

“Thank you,” I said. I walked down the gravel sidewalk to my truck. I managed to make it almost all the way there before letting the sadness take over.

I’ve been thinking about it for a couple of days now and trying to figure out how it came to be that I was so sad over someone I had only known in five-minute blocks for a few months. I knew she was old. They all are. I knew she might not be there on any given day, just like any of them, just like any of us. It shouldn’t have affected me so deeply.

It was only this morning that I figured it out. Yes, I was sad for Ms. Helen. Yes, I was sad for Mugs. But those tears were something else, I think.

Without a name, with only a few minutes on Thursdays, with just a few words of kindness and concern…

“She’ll know,” the woman had said.

The next time I show up and get my route packet, I expect I’ll flip to the very end first just to see if Ms. Helen’s name is there. I want to see her again. I want to see Mugs again.

And I want to thank her for being someone who knows.

From now until December 8, I’m running a small fundraiser for Meals on Wheels. You can find it here.

Other posts from Rapid Eye Reality:

• Monkey Chef Otis

Content originally appeared at Rapid Eye Reality by author Brad Willis.

Copyright © 2012
This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only.
The use of this feed on other websites breaches copyright. If this content is not in your news reader, it makes the page you are viewing an infringement of the copyright.
See the comments on this post

The post Meals, Mugs, and me first appeared on Rapid Eye Reality.

This is how we learn about tragedy today. It was how I learned of the massacre in Las Vegas. It was how I learned my dad died on this day six years ago.

It was how I found out somebody else I knew had killed himself. A guy my age. Seemed to have it all together. Didn’t. Dead.

A few weeks earlier, the note came through Facebook Messenger. It was a kid that time. Dead.

Standing there at the bathroom counter, I started to tally the tragedies again. I kept counting the dead until I couldn’t bear to count anymore. So many people gone with no warning, like a lightning bolt had shot from a sunny sky.

I’ve never enjoyed standing in front of the mirror. Narcissus-a man so enamored by his own reflection that he was imprisoned by it-was meant to be a warning. On the other end of the spectrum, there was once a pro basketball player who shaved in the shower instead of at a bathroom sink. For a few hours a day, he was a star in Boston. The rest of the time, he was a hopeless addict who would score drugs at halftime.

He shaved in the shower because he couldn’t bear to look at himself in the mirror.

The world is different than it was when I was younger. We spend so much time as the subjects of selfies and Snaps that we often convince ourselves that our smile we put on Facebook is the face we wear all the time.

We sometimes do everything we can to avoid looking at our real reflection.

Today I’m asking you to do just that. This will take a few minutes, but I hope the time it takes could change or even save a life.

***

Last month, some colleagues asked me to jot down some thoughts about World Mental Health Day. Their request came not long after my phone had lit up with more bad news. Though already rather overwhelmed with a long to-do list, I put everything aside and started writing. A lot of what you read here was part of what I produced that day. I’d planned for it to remain something a select group of people read. Those plans changed when people started coming up to me privately and thanking me for what I’d written.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized I had to share this. If I didn’t, it would be antithetical to what I’d hoped to convey in the first place:

Silence is killing us.

So, I’m also going to ask you to take some extra time to think about something you might not give enough attention: yourself.

I don’t know how or where you grew up, but when I was young, the society I knew taught us if we were hurt to rub some dirt on it and get on with our day. Fall off your bike and scrape your knee? Rub some dirt on it. Burn your hand on the oven? Dirt. Crippled by depression?

Well, there was no advice for that, because I don’t remember people talking about it at all. Society reserved its talk of mental health for the people they thought “crazy,” and no one wanted to be grouped in with the crazies. At its best, the public discourse about mental health focused on what people sometimes called, “nerves.” If your grandmother was acting differently, you might have heard your mom say, “Grandma’s nerves are acting up.”

In short, the advice was direct and to the point: If you have a problem, deal with it and do it as efficiently as possible, preferably without bothering anybody else. Rub some dirt on it.

While this was an attitude of an earlier era, its ghosts lingered. Even as people began to discuss mental health more openly, it was not always discussed with the kind of compassion you might expect. As recently as a couple of years ago, I had a very smart friend I respected a great deal say to me, “Depression isn’t real. It’s a problem of perspective. If people just decided to be happy, they’d be happy.”

Take a look in the mirror and ask yourself if you’ve ever thought or said something similar. Have you ever privately thought that someone suffering from anxiety or depression was weaker than you because they were having a hard time functioning in the same world as you? What about addiction? Do you see addicts as people who only care about themselves and their own wants? Do you wish people would just try harder to be as happy and content as you?

You don’t have to answer, but I’d ask that you keep reading.

Imagine living in a world where you can’t enjoy anything. Imagine a gravity to your world so heavy that you can’t get out of bed, no matter how hard you try. Imagine being so hobbled by your fear or sadness that you can’t bear the idea of looking anyone in the face. Not strangers. Not coworkers. Not the people you love. Imagine looking for anyone or anything that might help you make it through the day: a one-night stand, a bottle or three of vodka, your rent money on the poker table. Imagine, through no fault of your own, that you contracted this condition like a virus.

Now imagine everyone telling you to rub some dirt on it and get over it. This isn’t the way it should be in today’s world, many people are struggling with some form of mental battle within their head that could disable them for any period of time.

Or, think of it another way: imagine looking at someone with cancer and saying, “Think of it from a different perspective. Look at me. I don’t have cancer, so why should you?”

Or, if neither of those ideas helps you, do this: spend the rest of today looking at every person around you and imagining some of them were terrified that you’d discover they were living with a debilitating illness.

Guess what?

Some of them are.

***

If you’ve read this far, thank you. It wasn’t a test of your humanity as much as it was a simple reminder that sometimes in the hustle and bustle of everyday life, it’s much too easy to look out for people who might need a hand.

You know what’s harder? Figuring out if you might be one of those people.

Listen, we all have bad days. Maybe something makes us feel uncomfortable. Maybe we lost someone close to us. Maybe our job is getting stressful. Bad days happen. Bad months happen. The problem begins when those bad days don’t end when the sun goes down. Or when the weekend comes. Or when you flip the calendar to the next month.

So, you vow to get yourself under control. You go on a diet. You vow to not drink for a month. You put a stop-loss on your gambling. At first, you feel like you’ve beaten the problem you were facing. Sure, you didn’t enjoy it, but you proved to yourself you were in control.

But then something happens. Maybe you go back to the same behavior you were trying to stop in the first place. Or maybe you keep that under control, but you find yourself growing increasingly uncomfortable to the point that you’re not sure you are even yourself anymore. Maybe you feel even worse about things than you did when you were sure you had only an addiction problem.

There is a lot of fear associated with that moment. The walls start to close in. You get angry or sad or scared. You are afraid people can see what you’re feeling, so you isolate yourself from your friends and family and try to figure it out on your own.

It might spiral from there. Your isolation can lead to loneliness and a feeling that nobody could possibly understand what you’re feeling. You feel broken, and you can’t think of any way to fix yourself. Because you have isolated yourself, there is no one there to tell you it will be okay. Left to believe things will never be fine again, your mind can go to some very dark places.

It doesn’t always go that way. No condition is exactly the same. Anxiety, depression, and all of their kin find a way to exist and mutate in ways that will make you think that feeling uncomfortable or miserable is just who you are. It’s often difficult to even put your finger on exactly why you feel off. It’s ethereal and impossible to explain, almost to the point that you’ll wonder if it even exists. Singer-songwriter Jason Isbell recently described anxiety like this:

It’s the weight of the world
But it’s nothing at all

Maybe you never self-medicated with anything and just accepted that your life will always feel like trying to swim in heavy clothes. You’ve decided that you are meant to be broken, and there is no use in believing otherwise. Or maybe you tried to tell someone, and it didn’t go well. Maybe they said, “Have you considered just trying to be happy?”

And so here you are, wondering if there is anywhere to go from here, wondering if you will always feel sideways, wondering if you have to feel so alone.

If you are, if any of the above sounds even vaguely familiar to you, I’m going to ask you to do me a huge favor.

Please tell someone.

Finding a person to tell may end up being the hardest part of getting better. It’s possible you’re afraid of seeming weak. You might think you’re not worth taking up someone’s time. You could be scared of getting fired, worrying your family, or of becoming an outcast. Those fears might seem overpowering. To get over them, I offer you this:

What if you could feel as good as you feel bad right now? What if your daily misery became daily happiness? What if the real you-the one you’ve always aspired to be but couldn’t because you are anxious or depressed-could just appear and help you realize your dreams?

If those things were possible, could you get over your fear just long enough to tell one person? I hope you could.

It’s a first step of several you may have to take. You might need to find a therapist. You might need to find a doctor. You might need to take medicine. It won’t happen overnight, but if you take that first step, you may find a whole new life you couldn’t believe existed.

***

Though you might have come this far just as a favor to me, there was no one forcing you to do it. You didn’t have to cross the 2,000-word threshold, but you did, and there is a reason for that. Something rang true for you.

If you have two more minutes, let me offer one more story.

There is a person I know and admire a great deal. He was successful beyond all of his expectations. He rose far above where most people in his profession had. He was on top of the world. He had a great career, a beautiful girlfriend, tons of friends, and enough fame to last him a lifetime. For everyone watching from the outside, his life was pretty much perfect.

But something wasn’t right. He felt off. The world seemed darker than it should. He decided to quit drinking, sure that it would right his ship. For a while it did, but then the relationship with his girlfriend went south, and he began to spiral. He ended up alone in a very dark place. Late one night, he posted on Twitter that he thought he might be better off dead.

His Twitter replies began to fill up with people who wondered if he was being serious and begging him to reply. His DMs began to buzz.

And then there was nothing. His Twitter account stopped updating.

What happened?

Within an hour, there was a friend with him in his flat ready to talk until morning. What happened there was private, but there are two things that are 100% true:

That man let someone know he was hurting.

And someone came to help.

That man recently climbed a gigantic mountain with two friends. He had seen the bottom, and now he was on top of the world again.

***

I had a chance to chat with that friend for a second today. He’s still fighting. He’s getting better. He’s working on a new future.

That makes me happy. It gives me hope. It reminds me that I have a lot of other friends who have not yet found a way to say aloud, “Something is wrong.”

We’re living in a sideways time right now. Nothing makes sense. It’s isolating and scary. Some days it might seem easier just to ride out the day and hope the next day is better.

As I see it, the only way we-all of us-get better, is if we take a long look in the mirror and decide if it’s time to stop rubbing dirt on it.

Do what you can. Donate your money. Donate your time. Advocate for mental health causes. Talk about them honestly. Be kind.

Or, perhaps you will do something even greater.

If you know someone who might need help, reach out and let them know you are there.

If you think you might need help, try to find someone to tell. It won’t be easy, but it could change your life.

And if you can’t find anyone who will listen, or you can’t find anyone you feel safe telling, I promise you there is at least one person who can get you started.

My contact information is right here.

Other posts from Rapid Eye Reality:

• Owen Wilson married, and I’m the only pap
• Driving through snow in NC mountains.
• Also, fwiw, the North Carolina mountains are aweso…

Content originally appeared at Rapid Eye Reality by author Brad Willis.

Copyright © 2012
This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only.
The use of this feed on other websites breaches copyright. If this content is not in your news reader, it makes the page you are viewing an infringement of the copyright.
See the comments on this post

The post Mirrors & Mountains first appeared on Rapid Eye Reality.

Today, several days after it ran in the printed Journal, it got picked up online and started spreading. Before I’d eaten breakfast, I was persona non grata in every good music venue in town.

It’s not been my favorite day.

At first, I couldn’t figure out why my point went so wildly astray. In fact, it was only just now at 5pm that someone pointed out to me what the Greenville Journal’s social media people posted on Facebook.

Someone (not me) wrote the following as the Facebook post title of an article that had my name on it:

“In summation: Greenville’s music scene is simply not very good.”

It’s not in my nature to find a bus and throw somebody under it, but damned if I don’t find myself ready to do just that.

Let’s be clear: I didn’t write that line. I think that line is false. The fact that line is attached to my name has turned me (an old, tired, nearly-washed-up writer guy) into an apoplectic, cursing, footstomping lunatic.

So, here I sit after a day of trying to figure out what in the hell just happened, trying to figure out, beyond that, what to do about it.

Here’s the thing:

When I wrote the piece, I set out to make this point: Greenville’s marketing arm celebrates itself in Top Ten lists around the country. It celebrates the #YeahThatGreenville hashtag and all that it represents. The city marketing machine, however, does precious little to support the music community. The noise ordinance can be too restrictive. The marketing doesn’t do much to push the local music scene to the big magazines. It has the ability to support venues and musicians, but it doesn’t do enough. It’s only the venues that take their fate into their own hands and implement venue management software, have a strong marketing strategy, and support local music that can actually succeed. Nor, for that matter, do the local people who don’t want to buy tickets to see local acts play.

That was the point I set out to make. That the city leaders and the marketing people behind Greenville could do more to help the scene. And they aren’t.

When the piece ran in the printed paper last week, I didn’t hear one peep from anyone. I literally thought it was a dud.

And then today it got framed like this: (again, not my words): “In summation: Greenville’s music scene is simply not very good.”

This is the point where people I respect in the community began engaging in the kind of vitriolic talk you might expect from people who were just told they are “not very good.”

Well, of course they are going to be pissed off.

Thing is: I don’t believe that at all, and it was a complete misinterpretation of the point I hoped to make.

I love the local clubs. I don’t get out as much as I used to, but I still go, and I appreciate that running those venues is often thankless work. I have great admiration for the people who do it, and the fact that people think I don’t makes me sorry.

The point I was hoping to make stands: the city should do more to support music and help fill that mid-sized club hole.

But know this: the local music community is full of great people who work hard to offer people like me music. As I said in the article, “We’re better off for all of them and all the local artists who play the small stages around town. We owe them big time for keeping us in music.”

I’m no expert. I’m not a guy who could run a damned club. But I love music, and I love Greenville, and I sincerely just wanted the people who run this city to know that.

I’ve had some good conversations with good people today, including the folks at Greer’s The Spinning Jenny, a venue that is working hard to fill that one niche I was talking about.

But I’ve also talked with other people. Bookers, musicians, and other journalists. Some folks said just to eat it and let it blow over. Others listened to my explanations privately and said they understand where I’m coming from. The coolest thing that’s happened is having local artists contact me privately and invite me to come see them play.

If you disagree with the article itself, I can appreciate that. We can disagree about the need for a venue that size. I still would like one.

And if I didn’t make my point well enough or if it seemed like I was blaming any of the hardworking music community for that, that’s on me. It probably wasn’t the most elegant thing I’ve written. Let me come to your show. I’ll buy the beer and help you load out.

But if you think that I wrote “In summation: Greenville’s music scene is simply not very good,” I beg you to think again.

I didn’t write it. I don’t believe it. And I’ll stand in the middle of Main Street and scream until everybody knows that.

Other posts from Rapid Eye Reality:

• Rapid Eye Reality post: Why I didn’t pre-order the…
• Discarded Twitter posts
• Critical thinker

Content originally appeared at Rapid Eye Reality by author Brad Willis.

Copyright © 2012
This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only.
The use of this feed on other websites breaches copyright. If this content is not in your news reader, it makes the page you are viewing an infringement of the copyright.
See the comments on this post

The post Hey…I didn’t write that… first appeared on Rapid Eye Reality.

He came out of an indigo curtain, his buttons undone, his red tie hanging outside an open coat. The music was something out of a Hollywood exposition scene, neither dramatic nor any way recognizable. But, damn, he was happy.

And how could he not be?

No one outside of sycophants and asylum patients gave him a real chance. Nevertheless, here he was, the same semi-orange man we’ve seen for the past 18 months. He was coifed, swaggering, and self-sure.

He was barely removed from calling everything rigged—the media, the election, the entire damned system. But now, all of it had elected him to be the most powerful man in the free world. With a capped-teeth smile, he looked in the moment as if he couldn’t believe it himself. He touched his Vice President on the shoulder and innocently kissed the remaining women on the stage.

At the edge of the podium, the crowd chanted “U-S-A!”

Quietly, humbly, that man people had called a clown for 18 months uttered his first words as the President-elect of the United States of America.

“Thank you. Sorry to keep you waiting. Complicated business,” he said.

The cadence was the same the audience had heard for 18 months, but this time the gravity was different, because his next words were these:

“I’ve just received a call from Secretary Clinton. She congratulated us. It’s about us on our victory.”

The rest was off a teleprompter, but it wasn’t bad. He praised Hillary Clinton for her hard work. He said it was time to “bind the wounds of division.” He said, “It’s time for us to come together us one united people. It’s time.”

It’s the same thing any of us would want to hear from the President of the United States. It was humble. It was grateful. It was, although unbalanced, almost Presidential.

And it came from a man who wants to build a wall to stop Mexican immigrants. A man who wanted to give a religion test to enter the United States. A man who believed he could grab innocent women by the…

What does it matter?

It doesn’t. At this hour, President-elect Trump’s victory is decisive. It wasn’t even a contest. The how and why of it will be debated for the rest of my lifetime, but the simple fact is that this is what we asked for.

We asked for a democracy. A vote of the people. An electoral college.

Moreover, it’s what we allowed.

We allowed gerrymandering. We allowed a craven cable news system. We allowed a post-fact generation.

And it’s what we allowed ourselves to create.

A nationalistic, celebrity, strongman who flouts every convention we held sacred and does so to his own benefit.

Here’s the rub: we have to accept it.

If we’re to uphold the ideals of our nation, then we are to respect the office this man has—however he achieved it—earned. He may eventually lose the moral right to our respect for his Presidency, but until then our system of government makes him our President.

From a personal standpoint, I’m exhausted. If you gave me a torch, I’d burn it all down tonight in the hopes we could mold something from the ashes. But, deep down, I know the only path is to see it through. Whether it’s four years or eight, the only path is forward.

As I’ve said many times before, I’m a white, straight, married guy with a decent job. My life probably stands to improve in some weird way over the next four years.

But I have friends. They are gay. They are women. They are Muslim. They are foreign. They are other white, straight, American males. I worry about them all. Not just for the next four years, but for a long time after that.

Eight years ago, people made fun of me for having hope. They poked at me, giggling about the fact I was optimistic that President Obama was a reason to be hopeful. Some were relentless, and they guffawed at every one of Obama’s missteps.

Tonight—this morning, I guess—I will give them the courtesy of not wishing ill on this new President.

Instead, my hope is that President-elect Trump rises above his own rhetoric and turns himself into a man this nation can respect. He has time if he has the will.

Because now, some 22 hours after I got up this morning, I’ve just put my little boy back to bed. He woke up, looked at the results, and vomited twice (the two things weren’t related, admittedly, but the timing was sort of poetic). I put myself in bed beside him, rubbed his wispy hair, and asked him if he was okay.

“I’m okay, Daddy,” he said.

That’s the best I can do at 4am. I can rest assured my family is okay.

In less than three hours, my people will be awake for another day. The sunrise will look the same in every way, but it will happen in a different America. That’s not hyperbole. That’s a simple fact.

We’re headed down a different road, and it’s up to all of us to make sure the people we love make it all the way there with us.

And where is there? Well, I used to know the answer to that.

For now, let’s just walk together.

-30-

2:41am

All networks now confirming Hillary Clinton has conceded. Anyone who is reading this at this hour knows that already, but I figured it was worth noting for this record.

2:31am

Here it is folks. This is our new America.

2:20am

Listen, if you read this from bottom-to-top, I’ve been wrong at least as much as I’ve been right tonight, but this much is must be true: Donald Trump is going to be the President of the United States. If there is any doubt, which I don’t believe there is, there is zero reason for John Podesta to come out. There is zero reason for Secretary Clinton to not concede.

The point here is, you either stick it out and wait, or you concede. The one thing you don’t do? Exactly what President-elect Trump threatened to do and leave people waiting.

Meanwhile, here we go with what Trump is about to say. Get ready for a preview the next four years.

2:07am

This is a clip from a news story in a legitimate national American paper. And as much as it may hurt some of you to read, it’s true.

2:00am

At least half of you who read this one won’t like it, but it comes from a one of my smartest friends who I feel comfortable saying is unlike anyone you’ve ever met. He’s pragmatic to the point I want to strangle him sometimes. He often speaks against my interests, and I’d suggest he occasionally speaks against his own interests. But, he’s smart, practical, and worth your consideration. Here, he discusses The Resiliency of America.

1:30am

Black Dog hasn’t left my side. She’s restless, groaning against the non-stop coverage from the TV on the wall. She doesn’t want to hear Wolf, Carville, or Todd. They make her pull her big paws up underneath her chin. She whines, but she doesn’t leave, and she won’t until I do.

I won’t until it’s over.

It’s not that either of us think this night is in dispute. It’s that I won’t leave without witnessing it, and she won’t leave until I do.

It’s unquestioned loyalty. There is a warmer place she could go. There is a darker place. There is a quieter place. But she won’t go there until I see it through.

It’s exhausted grit. It’s believing you stick with the people you love. It’s knowing that, even if you don’t understand everything that’s happening, you know what’s important.

I’m lucky she considers me important, because otherwise I’d be watching this alone. Twitter has listed. Facebook has gone silent. My text messages haven’t buzzed in a while.

A man and his dog. I guess that’s how it ends sometimes.

12:30am

Here is something I want you to read. It comes from a friend of mine who lives in an important state in this election.

12am

It’s been 18 hours since I started this thing, something I thought was superfluous to the entire moment, something I thought would keep my brain occupied, something I thought would mark a different sort of historic moment in America.

My hopes for America are no secret, and the few views I keep private are pretty much in line with the public part of my life. If you know me at all, you know I’m uncomfortable right now. I’m watching my wife’s eyes, and they are breaking my heart.

As someone else said earlier, I’m a white guy who lives a comfortable life. I’m going to be fine, and there was no outcome where that wasn’t going to be the case.

Nevertheless, there are important issues in our society that I value over myself. There are people I love who need those issues to be resolved. What happens tonight is going to make that process a lot harder.

Yes, this was a lark tonight, and I think anyone who knows me well knew that.

I didn’t believe this was going to happen, and no one I knew did.

I can’t tell you about the conversation I just had with my wife, but I can tell you what I told everybody else on Twitter earlier.

11pm

I don’t even know who might have been reading here. I know a lot of you were, but I don’t know who it was, what your politics are, or how you’re feeling right now.

The boys went to bed a while ago. My wife is still here, but her eyes are intermittently closed, something that happened not too long after she said, “I’m sad.” The black dog is snoring beside me. White dog is roaming the house, uncomfortable and absorbing the weird anxiety that’s taken over this house.

I think we know where this is going, and it’s a new America. I’m going to try to put the rest of these people to bed, and then I’m going to watch this all go down. Bear witness, folks. This is a defining moment in our lives.

10:15pm

It’s 56° outside. There are scales of clouds over a gibbous moon. Something–frogs, crickets, I have no idea–is peeping in my yard. It’s American air, and it will be this time tomorrow night, no matter what happens tonight.

When I woke up today, I put on southern socks that say “Y’all” all over them. My shirt has my area code on it. My underwear? They are printed with an American flag.

I burst into my wife’s office wearing nothing but those underwear and a towel (as a cape, as you do). I sang a triumphant flourish of horns, hoping she ignored the obvious ugliness of the situation. She humored me with a half-smile and dispatched me from her workspace.

What do any of those mean? Well, nothing, I guess. In the moment, I meant it all to mean I’m a man who loves his city, who loves the South, and who loves America.

Like everyone else, I didn’t expect this to happen. Like everyone else, this makes me uncomfortable in ways I’m not ready to talk about.

But we did this, folks. We did this. No matter what we want to think right now, this is the U.S.

Put another way: this is US.

9:45pm

If there are any of you left here who are sober enough to read or not in the back of an ambulance, I’d like you to take a breath. Go outside. Breathe American air.

9:35pm

Mark it 9:35, dude. (AKA, the time America first admitted to itself that Donald Trump could be President of the United States)

9:30pm

No matter what happens in the next few hours, the referendum the anti-Trump crowd was looking for isn’t going to happen. The fact that the battleground states actually turned out to be battleground states is going to floor a lot of people.

If you want some reading material that will help explain it, read J.D. Vance’s bestseller Hillbilly Elegy. You may not like a lot of what it says, but it’s very instructive.

9:20pm

Dow futures down 300. Clinton drops to -180 on Pinnacle. We just poured cocktails.

9:15pm

From the UK…this tweet from Max Silver.

Every American who laughed at the UK for Brexit, this sweat is for you.

— Max Silver (@max_silver) November 9, 2016

9:00pm

My Twitter feed right now is a lot like the Alabama fans at the 2013 Iron Bowl the moment the ball fell in the hands of the receiver in the end zone, all issuing a collective, “Oh, wait. This could still turn out very badly.”

8:45pm

I spoke to a conservative I know a little while ago. He is the farthest thing from a Clinton supporter. Nevertheless, he had not yet put his kids to bed. He knows the likely outcome tonight, but he and his wife had a plan.

“We are trying to teach them the importance of respecting the president as a position,” he said.

You want hope for America? There it is.

8:30pm

And this is now. This is the moment I probably always knew was coming. This is my home state today. It’s not the fault of the media, politics, or anything I can firmly put a finger on right now. But here we are, watching an interview that is simultaneously about election returns and a serial killer investigation. Meanwhile, the GOP keeps the House and…

Trump: Arkansas

8:15pm

The AP finally called South Carolina for Trump, which, again, was always expected. He could have literally challenged Governor Nikki Haley to a duel and won this state.

Why? Well, look at Mark Sanford. You might remember Governor Mark Sanford? The one who disappeared from the state, claimed to be hiking the Appalachian Trail, and showed up in Argentina with a mistress. Yeah, he about to win another term in Congress.

Meanwhile, in a new modern record, America’s Couch managed to listen to Wolf Blitzer verbally masturbate for 75 minutes before changing the channel.

8:00pm

Here’s where most of the numbers start coming in, and the early projections are, of course, no surprise.

Trump: Oklahoma, Tennessee, Mississippi
Clinton: Illinois, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland, Rhode Island, District of Columbia, Delaware

My seven-year-old, due for bed, just collapsed on America’s Couch, and said, “Tell me in the morning who won President of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands…”

It went on, but you get the idea.

7:45pm

Everybody in my house needs a sedative. I rather expected this would be a party atmosphere. Instead, it’s like we’re waiting to hear if a loved one made it out of surgery. I’m comforting myself by looking at a picture of my kid that I’ve wanted to see for a long time.

7:30pm

Next result in, and again no surprise.

Trump: West Virginia. It’s the only state that exists entirely in Appalachia. He was always going to win there.

Meanwhile in California, the LA Times reports there is one person dead and multiple people shot near a polling station. More here.

7:15pm

Donald Trump will win South Carolina. This has almost never been in doubt.

But it’s very instructive that the networks can’t call South Carolina at 7pm.

That is, if you have an early day tomorrow and need to get some rest, you can pop the Ambien now.

7:00pm

First results in:

Trump: Indiana, Kentucky
Clinton: Vermont

Several years ago, I met a guy named Jeff. He was a poker player who had made a final table at the World Series of Poker. He lived near me and ended up becoming a friend of the local poker community in a lot of ways.

He’s a southern man in just about every way. His voice dips and drawls when he talks. He has dogs named Atticus and Scout. He smokes a pipe. He’s a decent man.

And we disagree on about 80% of the political issues most people think matter.

I still think he’s a decent man. In fact, I think he’s a very good man.

Here’s one request. If you do nothing else right now, think of one person you seriously disagree with politically but think is a good person, regardless.

Send that person a note right now and tell them thanks for being your friend. You’ll thank yourself for it.

6:15pm

Dinner’s on. I’m a little sideways in a way that I wasn’t expecting. So, we’ll ramble for a moment.

Remember, this is the moment that has consumed most of the world for 18 months. It’s longer than a normal sports season. It’s longer than a school year. It’s longer than most of the things in our life by which we measure time. It’s forever, and it’s been in the background of every major news story for as long as our short-term minds can handle.

And it’s all going to end sometime in the next few hours.

Think about that for a moment. The thing you’ve been arguing about. The thing that has been on your TV. The thing that everybody wants to talk about. It’s going to cease to exist like a bad drama series on Cinemax. No matter what happens right now, this obsession, this mess, this damned thing is going to turn into something else.

Look at whoever is sitting next to you and remember what they look like right now. Remember how you feel looking them. That’s going to change tonight. You may love them no less. You may not feel the difference at all. Regardless, no matter what you want to happen tonight, your world is about to change.

Yes, that’s a mess of hyperbole, but I’m bound by no standards of objectivity. I’m feeling slightly untethered for the first time today. This is my seventh Presidential election since I came of voting age, and it in no way feels familiar.

All I can do at this point is take the advice of my personal physician, Dr. Paul McGuire, who just texted, “I watched an hour of BBC coverage. You’d think the world wasn’t ending.”

6pm

“I’m uncomfortable.”

That’s what my wife said when I finally called her on her obvious anxiety. She’s been on edge all day long, and thought she’s an election junkie like me, she’s been subdued all day long. It’s been off-putting.

I didn’t admit, I’ve felt the same way most of the day. It’s like watching a circus performer on a tightrope. You know everything is going to be fine, but damn it, you sort of wish America had a net below it without so many holes.

And so, for now until the election returns start to come in at 7pm, we turn our focus to flag football and dinner. When we come back, we’ll be out on the wire.

5pm

After spending most of the day with my sons, I wondered what the older one thought about all of this. It’s clearly been on his mind, but I couldn’t help but ask myself how critically he was thinking about all of this. I decided to ask him a few questions. He surprised me in a few places, especially about halfway through. Have a listen while I cook dinner.

3pm

”Having an election night party?”

The cashier at Publix was probably in his early 20s and was eying my conveyor of groceries.

I must have looked shocked, because I shop there all the time, and when I have a party, it’s pretty obvious (and usually involves charcoal). Nevertheless, I conceded he was right. Within four hours, I’d be posted up on America’s Couch with a party of six waiting to see what’s next for the nation we call home.

This fact, and the fact I’m writing here at all requires the briefest of explanations about America’s Couch.

It’s U-shaped with space for two adults, two children, and with a perfect Tetris-style squeeze, two 75-pound Labs. It’s insignificant to the nation, the vote, or either of the major candidates. Yet, it’s ours and still looks at least reasonably like it did when this photo was taken in 2012.

America’s Couch

It belongs to two former journalists. She covered the 1996 GOP convention in San Diego. I covered the 1996 Democratic convention in Chicago. After that, we covered more campaigns and races than I can count. State races in three states. National races through three Presidential campaigns. We were junkies who, if we had kept the monkey on our back, would be up all night working on tonight’s results.

But we shook it off and turned ourselves into citizens. We had kids. We adopted dogs. We freelanced. We bought our own insurance. We became frighteningly…normal.

The byproducts of this decision were unexpected. First, when removed from the media bubble, we saw things differently than before. It’s hard to explain exactly what that means, but the value of not living and breathing the news every day can’t be understated. I sort of wish every journalist who works the beat was forced to go live a normal life for a couple of years as part of a Regular Citizen Internship.

Second, we didn’t lose the itch. Though we took ourselves out of the newsroom, we remained voracious election night consumers. By and by, we spent a lot of that time inviting our friends to join us virtually here at Rapid Eye Reality. It was a ball.

If I’m honest, while I’ve been live blogging for a living for more than a decade, the idea of one old guy doing longer-form blogging in 2016 is downright silly. This night will play out on Twitter, Facebook, and cable news. Nevertheless, this morning, I had a few people ask that we do it again. So, we are.

Who are we to comment on tonight? We are, as my wife put it on Facebook earlier, “We’re just an average American family trying to make it through this Election Day that some see as Historic and others see as the End of the World.”

For more, you can keep reading below.

1:30pm

The 12-year-old was suspicious of our motives.

“I feel like you’re making a joke,” he said. “I can see you smile.”

We were on our way to lunch. To one of our local Mexican joints. It was the wife’s suggestion.

If one wanted to believe we were going to eat Mr. Salsa one last time before there was a taco truck on every corner, well they could just go on believing that. But we weren’t saying it aloud. We weren’t building a wall. We were going to lunch. And we were going to pay for it.

We got the last seat in the house. Every table was full. Young, old, students on Election Day break, families like ours out for a quick bite. It was so busy, the owner himself brought us chips and drinks and then waited on us for the rest of the meal.

I’ve seen this guy time and again over the years I’ve been going to the place. I’ve seen his wife and staff. They are there almost all the time because I suspect they work almost all the time.

They walk through this city with brown skin and a Hispanic accent. They sponsor little league teams. They pay taxes. And judging by the old man’s shirt, he does something else.

As he walked away from our table, I saw the sticker just below his lapel.

“I voted,” it read.

12pm

Our precinct is just about a mile away through streets lined with orange and red trees. Our neighbors had their children bouncing in the leaves. When they waved and asked us if we were going to vote, it felt almost theatrical, like we could all stop in the street and break into song. Election Day: The Musical.

We walked our dogs through two neighborhoods and up to the elementary school where both my sons’ attended. I got yelled at for checking my cell phone in the line of 20 people waiting to vote.

“Up in here causing problems!” the poll worker yelled. “Don’t you know how much I get paid? And causing me problems!”

Her smile was faint, but it was there.

There aren’t any signs for Hillary Clinton in my neighborhood. In fact, I don’t know that I’ve seen a sign for Hillary anywhere in my community. I live in South Carolina, and a Clinton sign might be seen as a sign of northern aggression. We know how that turned out last time.

There are Trump signs, though. On neighbors’ doors. On their cars. In the hands of baseball teammates standing across the street from the polling place.

“You think you know somebody…” said one naïve soul who I’ve chosen not to name.

That’s the overriding theme of this election year: that we are dividing neighborhoods and friends, that we are doing so with malice aforethought, that we will take some pleasure in their pain tonight. My hope this afternoon is that that is fear talking. Whoever becomes the president of the United States, no doubt will more posters and signs be printed through sites such as supercheapsigns.com. We all have to show our support somehow.

I have a friend in the next neighborhood over, and though I’ve known him for a number of years, I don’t really know his politics. Regardless, I think know his heart. He wrote this last night.

While I waited to vote, a pizza delivery guy showed up to deliver two cheap pies to the poll workers. I shook my head at the quality of pizza those poll workers had to eat. When it came time to cast my ballot, the machine hiccupped once before letting me do my thing. I was in and out in 15 minutes.

On the way out, the poll worker who yelled at me put a sticker in my hand and said, “God bless you.”

“Thanks for volunteering,” I said.

She laughed. “Don’t you know I make $500 an hour to do this?”

“Then you can take me out for a steak when this is all over,” I said.

“Anytime, honey,” she said.

On the walk home, I saw a Papa John’s delivery driver pull into a neighbor’s driveway. It was the second delivery of bad pizza I’d seen in 30 minutes.

And I’ll be honest: no matter how much bonhomie I might try to conjure on this beautiful day, I judged those people.

Not for their vote, but instead for the pizza.

11am

I took down the Halloween decorations with my older son. The air smelled like the burning North Carolina mountains, and it made me think of an author I like. He lives up under the smoke, and he tweeted this today.

We put the skeleton in the collapsible wagon we use to lug baseball gear and rolled it toward the garage. It was hilariously macabre, and no one saw it but us, an middle-aged man with a paunch and a floppy-haired tween who hasn’t yet lived through the scariest days of his life. It’s why his smile is so genuine and his curiosity so pure.

Joy, the author, is ten years younger than me, and I don’t fault him for seeing this day through a lens of fear. While there are many people who would disagree, there are possible implications with today’s vote that are terrifying. I think those possibilities are unlikely, but they are not impossible, and for that Joy can be forgiven (or even celebrated for) his plan:

Nevertheless, no matter how amped I am right now, and no matter exactly how long I pour my drinks tonight, I remain still hopeful that America values itself enough to not burn itself down. I remain with roiling intestines and tension between my shoulder blades from the true and abject fear I felt on the afternoon of 9/11/01. I don’t remember being more scared for my country before that. At this hour, at least, I don’t feel that scared today. I hope that doesn’t change.

Finally, I thought of another Western North Carolina friend and this post he made to Facebook today. He is a reason to be hopeful. He is a reason to not be afraid.

9am

“They found another body on that’s guy property,” I said.

I was in the backseat of my Uber on the way home from the airport. I’d been gone for a week. I’d stayed in Atlantic City within view of the now-closed Trump Taj Mahal. Its doors were locked and the red Trump sign on top didn’t light up at night.

Now in the Uber, I was scrolling through the day’s news from my community and discovered there was a third body on the property of a suspected serial killer 30 minutes south of here.

“I’d say it was shocking if anything surprised me anymore,” the driver said.

He’d been as accommodating as the best drivers, offering my choice of radio station, air temperature, and cell phone charger. The ride was less than 15 minutes, but he wanted to make sure I was comfortable.

He and I talked about our former lives, mine in crime journalism, his in law enforcement and security. Both of us were in an Uber, which was probably telling in some way.

The driver had left law enforcement two years ago to help his wife when their first child was born.

“She served me with divorce papers,” he said, and then trailed off. He thought for a few minutes. “Its not so much that I’m out of law enforcement as waiting to get back into it.”

On this dark ride through the back roads of South Carolina, base-level politics weren’t going to matter much to two tired guys trying to do their best. Nevertheless, if you listened hard enough, you’d hear what it means to be an American. Put another way, it didn’t take long for the conversation to transition from serial killers to marriage and jobs.

“Which house is yours?” he asked at the top of my street, which was hilarious, because the entire thing was still lit up with Halloween decorations.

“The bright one, apparently,” I said.

From the curb, it did look sort of ridiculous. Scarecrows, ghosts, and mummies still milling about my yard eight days after the fact. I’m sure the neighbors talked.

But that’s just us. That’s the Willis Family right now. I left town on the morning of Halloween and just got back home. In the meantime, my wife managed school, hockey, basketball, flag football, and a bunch of freelance assignments. These are busy times, and the Mommy has to take precedence over the mummy.

It forces me to think, too, about the single mom who has a fulltime job…or two of them. The one who doesn’t have time to put up or take down Halloween decorations because she needs insurance for her kids. It makes me think of the dad who got up at 5am today to go to work like he has every day for as long as he can remember. Those people didn’t have the privilege of waking up today and snuggling with their kids over discussions on the origin of man. They didn’t take a long hot shower to wash the casino off them. They were probably wondering how they were going to pay the babysitter because schools are closed on Election Day.

I hope they could still find time to vote.

6am

I woke today before the sun came up. I had the day off after a long week on the road. I intended to sleep until the dogs or kids forced me awake. Instead, I saw a sliver of red-gold sunrise through my blackout curtains, and I knew I wasn’t going back to sleep.

My older son was already awake. He’s 12 and was as excited about Election Day as he was his own birthday. The younger boy wandered in later with morning breath, shivering against the morning cold. We hadn’t talked much in the week I’d been gone. He wanted to talk about an artificial lung he’d built, the Vietnamese man in the Guardians of the Galaxy hat who won the World Series of Poker, and whether the winner’s check was one of those big ones or a little one like his mom used to pay for his soccer enrichment.

Apropos of nothing, he, too, wanted to talk about the origin of man.

“A woman had to come first,” he said, unprompted. “Because women make men.”

“Okay,” I said. I’d had no coffee.

“But, then, what created the woman?” he asked.

“That’s a good question,” I said.

He paused, thinking about it, unbothered that I was watching.

“That’s trippy,” he said.

My wife was working on the breakfast table, buried in an assignment she hoped to finish before the end of the day. Two sleepy Labradors rose and stretched, unaware today was anything more than “People Are Going To Give Me Food Day” again.

This is my family on Election Day. We are white, privileged, happy Americans. We have run better in life than most people should be allowed to run. No matter which way the election goes tonight, our lives will not be dramatically impacted. Nevertheless, for reasons I can’t fully explain yet, this day feels important beyond what a cable news countdown clock would suggest. It feels like it has more gravity than a tumbling Twitter stream. It feels less ethereal and hollow than a Facebook feed.

It feels like a referendum on what it means to be an American, and that’s a kind of patriotism that makes a little flag in my hand feel like the weight of the world.

Other posts from Rapid Eye Reality:

• New blog post: Man without an Election Day http://…
• New blog post: Destin run live blog http://tinyurl…
• New blog post: Getting screwed: The Live Blog http…

Content originally appeared at Rapid Eye Reality by author Brad Willis.

Copyright © 2012
This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only.
The use of this feed on other websites breaches copyright. If this content is not in your news reader, it makes the page you are viewing an infringement of the copyright.
See the comments on this post

The post Election Day 2016 from America’s Couch: A live blog first appeared on Rapid Eye Reality.