For posterity, the title to this post is a reference to the new tax and spending bill the Republicans just passed which Trump calls the ‘Big Beautiful Bill‘. This legislation will enrich the uber-wealthy at the expense of the poor and disenfranchised. The dummies who put Trump in office are about to become more fully aware of the consequences of their ignorance and hatred.
The feature photo here is from the town where my family lives and it is infested with these folks who believe their lives will improve if they fuck over others who are a little more poor or misfortunate than they are.
As Richard Nixon once said ‘Fuck the Poor’!
I actually don’t think he said that. At least not out loud. Or at least not in presence of a tape machine or a reporter. But in ‘Where The Buffalo Roam’, while Hunter S. Thompson (portrayed brilliantly by Bill Murray) was interviewing Nixon in the men’s room, Nixon did say ‘fuck the poor‘. In compliance with the rigorous Fox News journalism integrity protocols, that’s a good enough source for me.
Gambling man rolls the dice, workingman pays the bill
It’s still fat and easy up on banker’s hill
Up on banker’s hill, the party’s going strong
Down here below we’re shackled and drawnThe Boss
We shall speak no more of politics in today’s update.
We had a nice couple of weekends at BDR. Juneteenth and July 4 weekend. Family and friends. Reflections. Some friends I have not seen for awhile. Shanna from Boise. Shane from Salt Lake City. Scott and Emily from Nashville. Dennis from Texas, Sonia and Mike from Roanoke.
Some fear and anxiety for those in the crosshairs of the stupid ICE dickheads and Noem’s engine of bigotry. But we stayed mostly positive in our gathering.
I sat outside for a long time the other night. In Ohio. Just a cigar and a little whisky. No book or technology. The air was clear from a late afternoon rain. The yard is pretty — freshly mown. The dog is with Brittany which brings some peace but also a void. The deck chairs are organized and the garden growing over their beds. Terri has planted some new flowers and dropped in a few lovely, very subtle solar-powered lights that give off a soft glow. There are a lot of fireflies which is nice because it seems they are more scarce than I remember from childhood.
Mom being sick terrifies us but also galvanizes us. Everyone is relieved because she is coming home tomorrow. A scare, but we fear almost certainly also a harbinger. She’s almost 89 after all. A night of reflection and mixed feelings.
Hospitals are war zones.
Detached. Dispassionate. Inefficient and supremely disappointing. My brother is deeply educated in stroke-awareness and treatment due to his work. He meets routinely with neurologists and studies this shit. So when we lit out with mom in the car driving 90mph or so towards the local hospital, Larry called ahead and let his contacts know we were en route with a highly likely stroke victim.
But we had forgotten about the half-wits in scrubs who man the perimeters as gatekeepers to the big brains in the back. So while we initially flew past them and into the examination area, they quickly rallied and asserted their dominance by calling the police to eject my bother and ignore mom for 20 minutes.
You know, because when someone is having a stroke, the best thing you can do is park them in a wheelchair outside the examination room and wait a while to see if it clears up on its own.
Meanwhile the gatekeepers, armed with their community college nursing certificates, finished up their phone text conversations and started firing up their computers to bury us in administrative hell.
I myself have a degree from on on-line university thank you very much. So am well qualified to make fun of all of us who were tricked into thinking we might learn something if gave over $20,000 and our precious weekends for a couple of years.
Being around 2 different hospitals (Big Ed followed mom’s lead and had a mini-stroke of his own the day after mom was released) revitalized my hatred for healthcare in America. We pay double and get half-assmuch. Yes, I just invented that new word and I sorta like it.
In spite of our paying double, every hospital also has fundraisers. They sell out the names of their buildings to the highest bidder (SafeAuto parking garage, Nationwide Children’s). Or sometimes vanity names to billionaires who can’t bear the thought of people not knowing how generous they are in giving away 1% of their ridiculous wealth.
So they raise more money from the community above and beyond what we all have to pay already and then we still cannot get good quality healthcare to around 30% of the people in the country.
My rituals can be exhaustive. And exhausting.
My drinking alone requires dozens of bottles and even more very specific glassware.
When I go outside at BDR after dinner, I have to take a bottle of red wine to have with my dessert. In addition to the dessert and plateware and silver and wineglass. Also a bottle of scotch or whisky or port and whatever glass is appropriate to that moment. Then I must have my iPad because I cannot be far for long from a computer. Also a book, and usually also a book of poetry and sometimes a magazine — because I am not sure always exactly what I want to read and I need options.
Usually also a cigar and my cutters and torches and a clean ash tray.
It’s a lot man. High maintenance I suppose.
Different days of the week are treated differently in terms of how much work I get done, what food I prepare, and what I drink.
I have no business dreaming about Bill Green. A guy I barely knew and was mostly scared of for the first 10 years or so I knew about him. Bill put out a vibe that was part Jack Kerouac and part Ted Kaczynski. Someone I sorta wanted to like me but that I definitely didn’t want to fuck with.
For decades Bill Green held court in one corner of The Pressbox in Pocatello Idaho. He was intimidating but not threatening. He had intelligent eyes full of humor that seemed to contrast with a general demeanor somewhere between menacing and mischievous.
‘You can look, but you’d better not fucking touch’, sort of vibe. He was nearly always smiling or laughing but I never quite trusted it.He seemed like the kind of guy that could probably strangle you with one hand while drinking a Coors and telling a joke to someone.
All this and he was only about 5’10” or so and not more than 180 lbs.
I was aware of Bill Green for a decade or so before I actually came to know him. Just a little. He was in many ways unknowable. At least to me. In a small town, eventually everyone comes to know everyone else. So it was that I became good friends with Bill’s brother and his family and especially his two nieces –both of whom I worked with at The College Market.
It may seem to a casual observer, that being somewhat close to the family would have given my favorability rating with Bill a little boost. Not so. With the green family, every relationship is individual and each is earned. There are no points awarded for having passed a lower threshold test.
But over time, I sorta got to know Bill in a way that guys who hang out in bars a lot give a grudging acknowledgment of the rigors of being a barfly. We were friendly, if not friends. And the fact that I worked with his nieces in a bookstore didn’t hurt. Bill was a reader and a reluctant intellectual, albeit one dressed perpetually in army fatigues (legit).
He was a character one might say. As was his brother — a dear friend.
Where is all this Bill Green stuff going? I have not thought about him for years. Then, up he pops in my dream with that grin and unsettling vibe that made me feel I needed to be fully alert. The dream was sort of a re-play of a moment in time.
Bill and I were standing at the bar of The Office following the funeral of a friend. A wake. Between us was Bullitt — my old rugby coach. Some young buck walked up and was giving Bill Green some shit about his dress military uniform which Bill had worn to the funeral. Bill laughed it off and bantered a little with the guy but clearly was not bothered. Bullitt, himself an old Vietnam era vet, did not have that passive gene. When Bullitt had enough, he grabbed the guy by the back of the neck and pulled him away from the bar and loosed a hard jackhammer to his jaw. The poor bastard flew across the room and slumped against the wall. Bullitt turned back, finished his beer and set down the glass and walked out.
That part was not a dream. That happened.
Neither Bill nor I were surprised. We knew Bullitt and so we just kept drinking and talking as if nothing ever happened. Eventually the kid came around and wandered out.
I knew my friend Carla had written a sad sort of final chapter in Bill’s existence. But I could not remember where I saw it. I tore my bookshelves apart. Looked under beds and in boxes and shelves and all the places I stash books and magazines that I knew I need to come back to someday. Then I found it. Black Rock and Sage. Issue 21 from Idaho State University Press.
There are people who write a lot. Maybe even call themselves writers. I am one of those people. I can occasionally string together a few sentences that are not terrible. Nothing approaching greatness but sometimes not bad and it pleases me.
There are people who are writers, and yet rarely write. This is my friend Carla. She has the words. The clarity of thought. The focus. The faculty to be concise and expansive at the same time.
But she rarely puts pen to paper. At least to my knowing. She is too busy making purses from old fabrics. And going to quilting bees. And thinking about the flow of rivers. Carla can find something on the street, sew on a bottle cap, hammer it onto an old piece of barn wood and glue some gingham cloth on and turn it into something I can’t remember how I ever lived without.
My house has some of her creations or something she found in an old pawn shop in some 10-cent western town that is now trading in pennies. She is just good like that.
Incidentally, I just spilled a sip of tequila on my keyboard and lost a thought in my haste to save my technology.
Marti howls along with the town emergency siren. I think she’s reaching out to her ancestors. It’s very endearing. I think it makes her feel part of something larger than her limited life and experiences allow. It binds her to her lineage and lets them know she is here and part of the pack. She’s not alone in this world — she has millennia of wolf, and dog and coyote ancestors standing behind her.
On a Wednesday morning, I worked on the design for the detached tree-house style bedroom for Black Dog Ridge, wrote several new paragraphs in my novel and worked with AI on wireframe layout for TOOM — all while sitting in a work design session. Multi-tasking mania. I’m average at everything.
BDR is back under construction. Garage is nearly done. Now starting on the new sky-high bedroom and new fireplace in the main house.
Here is a synopsis of my possessions. Toys, one might say. Too much I say — but I’ve never shied from a complicated lifestyle.
It’s all extravagant in a hillbilly sort of way.
It’s a lot of maintenance and care and never ends. But also satisfying somehow as mostly my things are utilitarian. I could live without the toys, but I choose not to.
Two homes fully furnished. One a modest house in a tiny little town with a nice patio and garden and a 4-car garage. This home sits directly across the street from my parents, which is important at this stage of our lives.
The other home is set in a beautiful space in Appalachia – on top of a ridge looking down over the Greenbrier River. This home comes with a 2-car garage and another outbuilding, outdoor kitchen, a large detached treehouse bedroom accessed by a skywalk (mid-construction), a big deck and 16 heavily wooded acres. This is Black Dog Ridge.
2 cars, 1 jeep, 2 motorcycles, 2 canoes (one bought and one 1/2 built), a camp trailer, a utility trailer, and a tractor with two loaders, backhoe, back blade and bush-hog for mowing.
Brittany has adopted the tractor and made it her own.
And one dog, although technically I do not own her. More like a roommate.
Kenny has finished building the new garage at Black Dog Ridge. I will insulate and upgrade the outbuilding and hope to use that for making wine and distilling whisky. Why not?
He is midway through putting a fireplace in the main house and also building the treehouse bedroom that adjoins the main house via the outdoor kitchen and an elevated wooden walkway. This bedroom will be free-standing approximately 1/2 way up the tree canopy about 50 feet down the ridge from the main house.
If Erroll could see me now!
Appalachian elegance.
I’ve been a little reflective lately. Thinking about how fortunate my life has been and what are my favorite experiences. Seems I’m making a lot of lists these days.
- Playing rugby with Portneuf Valley RFC on an Autumn Saturday morning in Idaho or Montana. I love this part of my life. Like most great experiences, we often don’t fully appreciate them until they gone. I identify primarily as a rugby player and writer.
- Opening the College Market Books & Coffee and the friends I made there. Carla, Kelly (and by extension Errol and Beverly), Shanna, & Deanna. John and Maureen I already knew but they joined our ragtag team of Barista’s back when that term meant something. And a lot of people who passed through those doors and became friends.
- MYO and all my kids and experiences in Southern Africa
- Years and years of international travel to, if not every corner of the world, a fair bit of it.
There are truckloads more experiences to unpack of course, but I seem to be looking back 20+ years just now.
Current state and last few years — also amazing. Never a day passes that I am not thankful to the universe for my fortunate yet insignificant existence. Brit, Marti, my family and friends and the blessing of being comfortable with only my own thoughts. Maybe a dog nearby to love on once in a while.
Humbly Submitted
Robert Myres – Flanker, Portneuf Valley Rugby Football Club (ret.)
The Martini Tales 