I stood outside last night and gazed at the April full moon. The moon is timeless and universal. The same moon people thousands of years ago gazed upon is the same one I see today. A theme of my latest work is time and I have always been a fan of space. For me the moon is an inspiration.
A few years ago one of my former students Qi (pronounced Chee) sent me an email imploring me to go outside and look at a big beautiful October moon. It marked the celebration of the Chinese mid autumn festival of the moon. She didn’t realize she was sharing book material with me, but that’s how it worked out. I named a character in my latest work in her honor as a result.
Last night the moon made me consider atmospheric conditions. My mind tends to bounce around all over the place. The moon bounced me right into my post for this week.
Anyway gentle reader here we go.
My writing feels more circumspect as time (that word) passes. When I first cranked up this newsletter my writing felt bold and witty. At least to me. I wrote a post a while back which contained a tidbit about the first modern school shooter in American history, sixteen year old Brenda Ann Spencer, who arose from bed January 29, 1979, looked out her window and pumped thirty rounds from a .22 semi-automatic rifle into the school across the street from where she lived. Ms. Spencer infamously cracked when asked during a telephone interview conducted as she was barricaded in her home afterwards why she did it “I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day.”
To this I added my own comment surmising she looked out the window and said to herself “What no deer?” She commenced firing at the most convenient targets killing the school principal, a custodian who died trying to move a child out of the firing line, and wounding eight children. I bet those children don’t like Mondays either and I’m sure Ms. Spencer livened up their day. Police negotiators coaxed her out of her home by offering to feed her some Burger King, the meal of choice for American mass murderers I suppose. I don’t know what they put in those Whoppers but McDonald's and Wendy’s need to step up their game.
Bruce Jenner on the Wheaties box, the face of the breakfast of champions would have nothing on a Quentin Tarantino ad campaign for Burger King built around the theme, The Lunch of Natural Born Killers with Audrey Hale gracing the latest burger bag from the home of the whopper. But I joke about an unfunny matter- mass murder. I suppose you could call it gallows, no gunfire humor.
In Tennessee protestors clamor for greater gun control as a Fisk graduate seeks to emulate John Lewis not recognizing the sixties ended a long time ago. Or did they. It is the answer many believe in when it comes to the question of how to stem the slaughter.
I’m not so sure. I smoked the devil’s dandruff for eight long, hard years starting in the late nineteen seventies. I observed from the front lines The War on Drugs, an effort so effective the streets of many American neighborhoods were flooded with cocaine by the mid-eighties. After standing in quays in The Bluff at four o’clock in the morning waiting on the arrival of the re up and seeing drugs dealt in open air drug markets by dealers who must have taken marketing courses at Harvard Business School. I am not so sure laws are the answer.
I’m surprised the Harvard dons never made their way to the south and wrote a business school case describing the rise and fall of The Miami Boys. Just the name Miami Boys would send crackheads into a dope fiendish frenzy clamoring to get their hands on some of that Ted Bundy. They could have taught Mark Zuckerberg a thing or two about pleasing your customers. People would literally step over human brains scattered in the dirt to get some of that Miami Boys.
And could you wipe that off your feet before you come in.
And fuck the law. Nobody cared in that part of the universe.
Maybe on earth people revered the law and feared the law man, but on Crack Centauri neither exuded much of a gravitational pull.
There’s something in the air in America that produces over and over again people who find it rational to gun down children. Get guns off the street, don’t change the atmosphere and you’ll be reading about someone plowing through a group of children after school in a pick-up truck. And when asked why they did it they’ll say something along the lines I don’t like Mondays. And could you pass the Whopper please?
There’s a meanness in America. It has always existed in certain parts of our society. Over time it has permeated our entire nation and poisoned the air with a foul scent. A scent that addles brains and leads some among us to absorb from the meanness in our air the idea it is their God given right to murder children.
We can pass gun laws. And natural born killers will make their own. Or buy them from internet gun dealers who don’t care who these weapons of war are turned upon as long as it is not them.
What we need to do. What we have to do. Is change the atmosphere in America. And that’s a task much more difficult than passing gun legislation.
Enjoy the moon.
Human beings by nature are Feral like cats! They must be tamed - civilized! Apparently, we must accept on some level the untamed will always be amongst us.