Photos in Boxes: A Girl I Knew

 

She thought she wasn't 'pretty'.  I thought she was but needed to ditch the Disney top.  

And she did.  

And she was certainly pretty.

More Nudity In My Backyard

 

April 2022

 

 

 

I used to take photos all the time.  Nude photos of actual women.  It was way more fun than taking photos of myself.  But this is a challenge, too, to make my old, beat-up body look acceptable.  I'm never going to have chiseled abs or any of that, but I can do my best to take photos that don't make people vomit.  I think this is my goal now. 

Now Wait A Goddamned Minute: April 2022

 

I think it’s long past time that we talk about this. .

Putin invaded a neighbouring country that was mostly just sitting there, feeding the world and having some really hot government women.  (Who knew?)  Almost immediately, Russia started destroying schools, medical clinics, churches – and the homes and lives of regular people who had nothing to do with the Ukraine military.  Now we see them wiping out entire villages and medium-sized cities and suburbs – and torturing, raping, murdering human beings by the thousands.

This morning, I once again saw them targeting civilians with cluster bombs, which the rest of the world (mostly) recognizes as a war crime. 

How long does the world wait?  How many Ukrainians do we allow Russian troops to torture, kidnap, rape, murder before we really say, “Now wait just a goddamned minute.”

I think it’s time to say, “Now wait just a goddamned minute.”

Putin needs a win.  He’s been running things for 20-odd years and this is his big moment.  He’s long in the tooth for a dictator and is probably thinking how the rule of other dictators has ended.  Think Romania.  Best thing for him is to declare a war – whatever he wants to call it – and demonize the “others” and bring to bear one of the biggest military machines on earth. 

He wanted a quick win but Ukraine said, “Now wait just a goddamned minute.” 

Oh, we’ll bring suffering down upon the Russian people.  These sanctions are not a joke.  But you know what I think?  I think Putin doesn’t give a flying fuck at a rolling donut.  He’s riled up the populace, telling them that Ukraine is chock full o’ Nazis and he’s spouting that populist bullshit that Trump so adores.  Let’s get angry at someone and ignore our own troubles by pummeling their country back to the Paleozoic.  “I know the price of borscht has doubled, but we have to kill Nazis, don’t we?” 

 

And those sanctions are not going to really touch Putin.  And he is what matters here.  Putin is insulated and has plenty of reserves.  And he listens to nobody’s counsel.  He is an autocrat, a dictator, doing what dictators do.  Everyone says he respects only strength.  Sanctions?  What does he care?

 

What can we do?  Fuck if I know, but I have some ideas.  We go to the UN and tell them the train is leaving the station.  We’re using existing coalitions (NATO) and gathering non-NATO countries to commit to being with us or against us.  We use NATO forces, not just ours, and we move offensive weapons, big ones, into eastern Ukraine.  We declare a no-fly zone over all of Ukraine.  Yes, yes, we do.  And NATO fighters patrol and blow Russian jets out of the fucking sky if they violate the airspace.  We send trainers (this is what Special Forces do on a daily basis, trust me) to make sure the Ukrainians can efficiently operate the weapons.  We say, collectively, to Putin: “Now wait just a goddamned minute.”

The turd in the punchbowl is nuclear, of course.  I know that.  I also know it always has been and Putin isn’t insane by any measure.  He isn’t interested in blowing up the planet; he just wants to return to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when the Soviet Union held sway over much of eastern Europe.

 

A few people have asked me, “Why can’t we just take him out?”  I get the sentiment.  It would be party time in the West, but there are some things we need to consider.  In spite of our not-to-distant past, it is illegal to assassinate foreign leaders.  No one can issue that order and no one should attempt to follow that order.  You can bitch if you want to and I’ll have some level of agreement here, but this is a fact: we cannot and should not do it.  If such a fate befalls Putin, and we can all hope for it but not facilitate it, it will have to be from within.  And he is a ruthless bastard and that inner circle all want to avoid being poisoned – or summarily shot.  And this is what dictators do.

Remember a few years ago?  We had our own populist bastard to deal with.  Nowhere near as cunning as Putin and with fewer powers to make trouble, we still see a groundswell of support for him.   We hate to admit it, but it’s obvious that Trump still wields considerable sway among Republicans and the unwashed cousin-fuckers.  Putin has far more control over what his population understands and has used it smartly.  Putin’s popularity ratings are dazzling!  And those numbers are most likely accurate. No matter how we feel about it, he’s good at convincing his population that he is only doing it for them and, more importantly, he’s the only one that can do it. 

Remember this?  “I alone can fix it.” 

We should shun anyone narcissistic enough to make such a statement. 

But we need to do what we’re supposed to do.  When we confront a terrorist regime, the game changes.  This is not some pompous Latin American hothead, killing mostly his own people or invading some other banana republic.  This is a monster, invested in destroying a west-leaning democracy and rebuilding an empire in Europe.  We’re supposed to be the guys that stop the terror. 

Where’s our white horse?

Defining Capricious

 

I sure love photos of kittens, don’t you?

 

Facebook is a swamp.  A quagmire.  Robots roam the landscape, incapable of understanding human language; the best they can do is parse out certain keywords.  Then, they pounce on unwary Facebook users, suspending accounts amidst accusations of violating community standards.

 

I just came off a 30 day sentence for opining that Vladimir Putin should be shot as a war criminal. Maybe I should have said “hanged”, which we do now and then to war criminals, but maybe it wasn’t the methodology as much as the suggestion that he be killed.  Does anyone outside of Mother Russia NOT want to see him taken out?

 

So my sentence expired and I went back to doing what I do.  I read an article (on WLOX, the local Biloxi TV station, which is teeming with bubbas and mobile home denizens) about an elderly couple who got lost in the mountains.  He died, probably of dehydration, but his wife survived.  And a comment I couldn’t pass up was that “God was with her.”   I said that god apparently was NOT with him and callously allowed him to expire.  The OP said, “Really?”  I pretended she was agreeing with me and said, “I know!  Those Christians certainly have a capricious Sky Uncle, don’t they?” 

Warning: DO NOT CALL IMAGINARY SUPREME BEINGS CAPRICIOUS. I hereby give you the dictionary definition of ‘capricious’ – “given to sudden and unaccountable changes of mood or behavior.” 

 

I guess the Robot Overlords never read about those ancient Greek Sky Uncles.

 

I’m considering just downloading all my photos (okay, SOME of my photos) and my notes and little stories and just eliminating, deleting my account.  I might post a hundred photos of my ballsack first with captions explaining what exactly the Facebook Overlords can do with it. 

 

Maybe it’s time to let JoeBob do the Lord’s work.  Jack is certainly on someone’s radar screen. 

 

Thoughts Regarding My Strained Relationship with My Dead Brother

 

I’m going to talk a little bit about my brother.  He died a few years back, and my sister wrote just a few days ago on Facebook, “I miss him.”  I was tempted to write – but did not – that I had missed him since 1984, damned near 40 years ago as I type.  That was the last time he was an active member of our nuclear family.

He fell away from us, slowly at first and then picked up speed.  During the early years, he might show up for special occasions like Mardi Gras or someone’s birthday.  Then again, he might not.  He was always welcome, to be sure, as was his entire family.  After those first few years, even those rare appearances ceased. 

I was off in the military, but when I came home I tried to patch things up.  He had begun to believe that my mother – his mother, too – was some sort of unimaginable parasite, only contacting him when she needed something done.  This was patently false, but he lived with someone who promoted this ridiculous idea.  My brother was the baby, and my mother loved him more than she ever loved any of us.  Her baby.  One Christmas, I realized that my mom had not seen my brother in years.  This she told me as we rode around Ocean Springs, looking at Christmas lights.  I decided to take her to his house, unannounced, and we would wish each other happy holidays and make progress and so on.

He didn’t actually throw us out but neither were we welcomed with open arms.  We sat uncomfortably in his house for maybe 30 minutes before it just became too much.  He and his family didn’t want us there, that much was clear.  And so we made ourselves not there. My mom was thankful, though, that she'd seen him.  She would take what she could get with him.

I made other attempts to pretend things could be repaired.  One Saturday morning, I went to his house and together we walked the property where we had grown up.  We knew every tree, every inch of the jungle where we played, and we reminisced about treehouses and cousins and snakes we had known and so on.  And we talked about his relationship – lack of, to be clear – with the family.  We hated his wife, he told me, and we were hateful people.  I asked him to look at all the husbands and wives we had taken in over the years, and some of them could be pains in the ass, but they were family nonetheless. We weren’t going to reject his wife even if she was a bigger pain in the ass than the others.  She was family, as were his daughters. 

No, he said, we had chosen to hold her at arm’s length for no good reason.  He was bitter about how we had accepted the others and not her.  I said that maybe she was responsible for that, not us.  I said that if 10 people are looking at a car and nine say it’s blue and one guy says it’s red, maybe the one guy is fucked up, not the nine others. But, I said, I was willing, as were the other family members, to let it all go, to normalize our relationship, to get to know his kids, to have him once again be one of us.

And he rejected that outright. 

My eldest will turn 21 this year.  My brother met him once, and that was because I set it up and made it happen.  My youngest, a few years ago, was amazed to hear that I even had a brother.  I think about that a lot.  I had such love and respect for (most of) my uncles back when they were alive.  I went with them here and there, hunting and cleaning squirrels and picking beans and plucking guitars.

For a while, when I would be flung by events across the planet, I would send his girls a postcard.  I would have loved to get postcards from around the world when I was little!  Maybe I could have a relationship with his daughters.  Maybe I could be that cool uncle that sent them shit from other countries!  I never heard a word about it.  I don’t even know if they got them.  Maybe his wife intercepted them and tossed them in the garbage.  Who knows?

Along the way, my mom got busy dying.  Her last two weeks were full of friends and family and poboys and whatever she wanted minus the cigarettes, which I would have cheerfully supplied had it not been for the oxygen tank.  Maybe an explosion would have been a more dramatic way to go, but I didn’t think about that then.  Live and learn.  My brother dutifully appeared along with his tribe.  The girls, his girls, had no idea that their grandmother lived so close, they told me.  They could have visited, they said.  Ocean Springs is not big.  His house was about five minutes away and those girls didn’t even know where she lived.  Can you imagine not knowing where your grandmother lives? 

His wife came to my mom’s deathbed.  My mom looked up and said, having lost her ability to really give a shit what anyone thought, “What’s SHE doing here?  Now I’m sure I’m going to die.”  How many years since his wife had been in my mother’s house?  We could probably measure it in decades.  My then-wife made some food, some tasty Peruvian dish, I think – maybe arroz con pollo, chicken and rice.  And we ate it and were thankful to have it.  Later, the ex was cleaning up the kitchen, doing the dishes and whatnot.  My brother’s wife said it wasn’t fair – she had cooked and then she had to clean, too?  And the ex said, “My husband’s mother is dying and there’s nothing I can do about that.  But I can cook and clean so that’s what I’m doing.”  There were two very different types of people involved in that conversation.

I imagined that my mom’s death would bring us back together.  It did – for about 24 hours, and then his clan once again withdrew and ignored invitations to family events.  We were shunned.

Time went by and my middle sister got busy dying, too.  I flew home and we were all gathered at the hospital, hoping for a miracle that we were never going to get.  And there he was with his tribe, lamenting, crying, acting as if he hadn’t shunned my dear sister for decades.  I was not yet cold enough to point out that he only appeared when someone was dying.  (I did eventually get there.)  So once again, there we were, all of us, gathered like an actual family.  And we all picked up food from local places and ate it in a little room as we waited for my sister to die.  We ate together, recalled fun times long past, leaving the troubles aside for a few days.  And then she died and we buried her.  He and his clan once again withdrew.  My eldest sister, now our matriarch, was so sad then.  She’d lost her sister and now her wayward brother had yet again disappeared.  She tried so hard to invited him to everything and he rejected every attempt. 

One of his daughters was attempting college and needed help with her writing.  She emailed me – would I help her?  Of course.  Maybe this was the breakthrough moment.  So I spent many nights editing her papers, giving her suggestions, emailing back and forth like normal people.  But once she had used me up, she ghosted my ass but good. Eventually she began to insult me, too.  She said things to me that would have been completely unacceptable had I said such things to any of my uncles.

So it goes.

At some point, he rejected my sister’s invitation to something, I can’t remember what now, and I’d had enough.  I decided to tell him some hard truths.  Maybe he didn’t need to hear it but I sure needed to say it.  We had tip-toed around his bullshit for nearly 40 years, not saying what was really going on because there was always the hope that he’d come back to us.  Nobody wanted to burn the bridges, I suppose.  I wrote him a deadly accurate message.  I was not nice about it.  I told him to stop pretending to give a shit just because a nuclear family member was dying.  Do not, I said, bother to show up for my funeral should I go first (this seemed likely then).  Don’t pretend that you give a fuck, because you don’t and we both know it.  I told him what he’d done to his own mother.  How he had ignored his now dead sister until she was actually dying.  How he’d hurt my other sister with his continual ignoring of her pleas to come for Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthdays, all of that.  I told him he should be ashamed but that I knew he was not.  Take your little tribe of bitches and call it a day, I said.  I can go and on and I’d held all that in for so many years, so I did go on and on.  We never spoke again, although I heard that he wanted to “beat my ass”.  I’m really too old for fistfights and he was a big motherfucker, but I figured he had perhaps forgotten that I was no longer the skinny hippie he remembered.  I was a fully grown man with decades of military experience.  I didn’t worry too much about his threats.  His health was terrible, too, so I could have just run from him for a couple of minutes until he collapsed and then taken him easily, but I’m kind of just kidding about that.  Mostly.

And then he died.  I thought a lot about how I felt about him.  We sure had some good times when we were little, hacking paths through the jungle and so on.  I decided that I missed that guy but he’d been gone for a very long time.  I loved him – he was my brother – but I didn’t like him.  And his tribe made it clear that if I (or my dear sister) showed up for his funeral, there would be Big Trouble.  They weren’t subtle about it.   

That’s never been one of their strengths.

And so that’s the way I see it.  Our family’s split with him – and it was always his choice - has caused me to lose contact with cousins who live in Ocean Springs and only heard one side of the story – his side.  Even some of the Lumberton part of the family delights in telling me what a great guy he was.  I’m glad they feel that way about him, but there’s an undercurrent there of what assholes the rest of my nuclear family was to him.  That was never true.  We always wanted him back, except for me during the last few years.  And it took me a long fucking time to come to that.