Christmas Day 2020

 

It rained when it should have snowed.
When we went to gather holly

the ditches were swimming, we were wet
to the knees, our hands were all jags

and water ran up our sleeves.
There should have been berries

but the sprigs we brought into the house
gleamed like smashed bottle-glass.

Now here I am, in a room that is decked
with the red-berried, waxy-leafed stuff,

and I almost forgot what it's like
to be wet to the skin or longing for snow.

I reach for a book like a doubter
and want it to flare round my hand,

a black letter bush, a glittering shield-wall,
cutting as holly and ice.

---”Holly”, from "Station Island" by Seamus Heaney.

 (h/t to Lance Mannion, who has been posting these evocative Heaney poems...)

Christmas Eve, 4:00 am

 The Little House is dark. 

 Well, almost dark; the IKEA light under the shelves in the kitchen corner is on - because I made a pot of coffee about half and hour ago - and the phosphor glow of the laptop screen picks out one end of the table that makes the east half of the front room the "dining room".

Have I ever talked about this house?

It's almost a century old. Ninety-nine years old in just over a week; built in 1922, when this part of what's called the "Peninsula" - the triangle that narrows to the northwest as the Willamette and Columbia Rivers converge - had been Portland for barely seven years.

(Before that it hadn't been much of anything, lightly-built-over farmland between the little city of St. Johns to the northwest and Albina to the south - to the east was pretty much actual farmland all the way out east to the mouth of the Gorge. But that was then.)

The area was slowly filling in, but slowly. Here's the Corps of Engineers aerial photo from 1936. Nearly thirty years after incorporation, and over a decade after the Little House was built, and much of this section of what is now the "Portsmouth" neighborhood was open fields, including actual FARM fields.

This house and the house just to the east were built on the same plan, presumably by the same builder, and because of that probably on "spec"; that is, not to a waiting homeowner but by a developer who hoped to sell the new houses to random buyers.

It's...well, my Bride likes to describe our house as having "ugly bones", and it's true. The two houses were thrown up cheap and quick and small. The original design had a pair of rooms facing the street; a "parlor" and a "dining room" separated by a structural wall from the back of the house. The dining room opened onto the kitchen, the kitchen onto a hallway that ran the length of the house. In the back were two bedrooms on one side and a bathroom on the other. A detached garage sat out in the back facing the alley.

It looked like this:

Both this and the sister house next door have been extensively modified since they were built. Interestingly, the house to the east still retains the original separate parlor-and-dining-room arrangement, but at some point (probably after the fire that damaged the front of our house in the 1980s) the owners tore out the wall between the two front rooms to make a single large one.

They also punched a hole in the load-bearing wall that runs across the house, opening the hall to the front.

At some point they enclosed the back porch, making the weird "room of closets" we ripped apart fo make Missy's now-filthy-trashpile of a bedroom.

Here's the current floorplan:

The best part of the house are the wood floors. They're not hardwood - remember; cheap, quick, and small - but they're a clear, straight-grain fir. 

They were also painted, for some reason, and were repainted numerous times. The earliest coat was the most peculiar; when I stripped the floors in both the bedrooms the bulk of the paint came up in strips. Y'know, the way paint does when you strip it.

The bottom layer, a deep red color, turned into a sort of vile jelly. I suspect it probably had a crap-ton of lead in it, too, but the consistency was the worst part. You had to scrape it with a blade and then wipe the blade to clear it. It also stained hell out of anything it touched. I have no idea what it was, but it was truly nasty.

After all the paint a former owner laid down a then-standard cheap, nasty Seventies or early Eighties short-nap carpet. Pulling THAT shit out was pure pleasure.

Anyway...that's the house. The roof is getting there; it's easily twenty years old and small parts tend to turn up in the yard after a big storm, so that's on the list. The boards of the deck we had built outside the east wall ten years are getting a little shifty, as well, so those need to be replaced soon.

And...well, this seems mean when I just say it out loud, but...the house is getting smaller as I get older, and I'm ready for the kids to move out on their own so we can have it to ourselves.

I'm tired of the mess, and tired of the clutter, tired of having little or no privacy or quiet when everyone's home. They're good kids and I love them, but...I'm ready to start loving them from a bit more distance.

I suspect that makes me a bit of a bastard.

But as I think I've mentioned. I am a bit of a bastard. I've got some sort of deep-seated survival thing that makes me more than a little callous. I'd be the guy who walks out of the airplane-crash-in-the-Andes-where-the-survivors-resort-to-cannibalism having gained three pounds. It's not that I don't feel the griefs and regrets. It's just that I do, and then I go about my business.

So I don't want my kids out of my life; I just want them in it a bit further away.

And I want my life back.

I realize that things would have been difficult during a global pandemic regardless, but I'm quietly furious at Tubby Twatmite and his merry band of incompetent GOP grifters and stooges for fucking it up so badly that I have to sneak around like a weasel in a minefield. 

I miss all the little pleasures; the evenings out, the casual times with friends, the little small change of life.

And it's worse because that time is running out. I don't have thirty or forty years to make up for this lost time. I've got, if I'm lucky, another fifteen or twenty good years and then it's going to go to hell in a hurry. I'm not looking forward to my eighties, assuming I make it that far. 

So I rage at every day we're immured behind the high walls we need to keep the Mongols out, and that makes me resent even more every moment I'm losing to this fucking Plague, and that makes me even more pissed off at the goddamn nitwit and his slobbering cult.

And I'm tired of watching my country and my countrymen become smaller and meaner and stupider and angrier. 

I'm tired of the past four years where everything is transactional, all about the Art of the Deal, contingent on What's In It For Me. I want us to be better, and kinder, and smarter. 

I want a brighter day.

I want what Charlie Pierce wants and said sooner and better than I:

"...may you all have the rest and peace of this mid-winter holiday season. May all your whiskey be mellow and may all your lights shine. And may there always be a candle in the window, calling you home, calling you out of the storm, calling all of us home, together, and home."

Blood Money

It’s difficult to put in words how infuriating Trump’s pardons of the Blackwater Nisour Square scum are.

But imagine if you spent a huge chunk of your life perfecting a difficult, dangerous craft only to find that a gang of incompetent, undisciplined, arrogant hackers had used it to just go wild, randomly killing helpless innocent people, in the process also disgracing you and your craft while making that craft even more difficult and dangerous.

And then, when you finally manage to see these dangerous fools given the barest minimum punishment needed to ensure they serve as a warning to future dangerous fools, your boss - who is a hopelessly stupid fool himself with only the most cartoonish and moron-grade understanding of your craft - undoes all that in an instant for no reason other than his foolish whim, making a hollow mockery of you and the labor and suffering you and yours had devoted to that work.

And, mind you, this is completely leaving out the contempt and disrespect for the murdered victims of these scum, who deserve more justice than to have their lives and deaths thrown away again by a fucking coward who ran away when it was his turn to risk his precious skin.

That's what these pardons mean; the exact opposite of what Trump believes. 

 

They mock and sneer at every murdered civilian and at every good US troop who did their work honorably and well. They make America small and weak.

It is a God-damned lie to say that these
Saved, or knew, anything worth any man’s pride.
They were professional murderers and they took
Their blood money and their impious risks and died.
In spite of all their kind some elements of worth
With difficulty persist here and there on earth.

~ Hugh MacDiarmid

Acting 1SG Lawes reads the morning formation announcements

Comp-ney, Atten-shun!

At ease.

Okay, listen up. Coupla things here.

First.

Final formation today will include this month's awards and decorations, and the Old Man will have more to say about that during the a-formentioned occasion. 

Let me just note my congratulations to those of you heroes who will be honored. Thank you for your fucking service, as the good people of the nation would probably say in lieu of buying you an actual drink, the cheap bastards.

I do want to call attention to Specialist Tenney, however, for what may be the most unique award of the coveted 82nd Airborne Distinguished Trooper Award I have ever in my entire career been privy to.

Specifically, it is for the "period between 14 and 15 November". I want you to note that.

Because during that period Specialist Tenney was doing the extra duty he was assigned subsequent to the little incident outside the shopette down in the Divarty AO which we will not revisit other than recommend you please do not take Specialist Tenney as your model the next time you are in Divarty AO and are seized by the mad compulsion for a two-liter of Mountain Dew Code Red and a party-size bag of jalapeno-flavored pork rinds, do I have that part correct, Specialist Tenney? 

Thank-kew.

During this period my understanding is that Specialist Tenney was detailed to perform area beautification outside the senior enlisted quarters at Randolph Point.

Specifically, outside the Brigade Sergeant Major's residence.

The recommendation for award came through Brigade, but I note that the handwriting of the signature on the form appears suspiciously similar to that of Missus Brigade Sergeant Major that appears on the lovely holiday card which we received in lieu of a holiday party we cannot hold in person during what I understand are still these "trying times" if the Yadkin Pawn commercial I viewed last night was correct.

Let me make this simple, people.

Whilst I appreciate your willingness to help those in our Army family in need, and I also find it admirable that you are willing to go that extra mile above and beyond the boundaries of your military duties, I strongly recommend that you do not, I say again not, push those boundaries in such a way as to excite the domestic suspicions of certain senior individuals who might possibly be in a position to exert undue pressure on other senior members of your NCO chain.

Put plainly, people, the Brigade Sergeant Major has never been accused of being the most accurate round in the shot group, but if you take advantage of your proximity to his Domestic Six to trim certain bushes in his fucking yard it is possible - perhaps not likely but possible - that he will take notice and respond in ways that you are likely to regret, and that I am likely to be forced to deal with, and neither you nor I will enjoy that.

In other words, keep it in your pants, people. Specialist Tenney, you may take this as both a belated warning and a kind of wary and rueful sort of congratulation, you magnificent bastard.

Second.

The Space Force operational area at North Post is no longer off-limits after resolution of that contretemps regarding the actions of certain individuals in the 504th. 

As I know that both your military bearing and individual capabilities are superior to the entire collective ASVAB scores of the fucking 504th I have no fears that you will be involved in any similar issues, but I remind you once again, however, that if and when you are a guest of the Space Force people you now represent not just this unit and the Airborne but the entire United States Army before a sister service, and are expected to behave as such.

Which brings me to the following item I received from Command Master Senior Space Sergeant Rogers, the Space Force CSM. To wit:

The proper term of address for a Space Force person is Guar...

G...

Guard...

Yes, Sergeant Harder, I know this is not a laughing matter! Just give me a fucking moment here.

Guardian!

Aha.

Moving on, people, look. CMSSS Rogers writes to advise me that in the future, parties of off-duty individuals from this Division will be welcome in their unit area providing certain groundrules are followed.

Driving in loudly playing something I am informed is called "Peter Quill's Awesome Mixtape" on POV speakers is getting old and is highly discouraged.

No, there are no fucking talking raccoons in the Space Force area, and walking around holding out beef jerky at knee level saying "here raccoon, raccoon, raccoon" trying to lure them out is simulatneously futile, irritating, and disrespectful, and,

The next individual who replies to any form of address from a G...Gu...Guardian!(fuck!)...with "I am Groot." will be referred to his chain of command for disciplinary action. This includes responding to salutes, which, I remind you, is highly unprofessional.

Play nice with the spacemen, people. I am counting on you to remember who you represent.

Are we clear?

Good. That is all.

Comp-ney, Atten-shun!

Platoon sergeants, take charge.

Oh, dear, or "why you never sleep with anyone crazier than you are"

 I've gotta say; I don't think I've ever seen a political party go from "we're just your basic plutocrat-fluffing Tories with a side of pandering to racists" to "OOGABOOGAWHAKKANOKKABOOGALOOOOO!!!!" so quickly. 

Seriously.

The GOP is fucking utterly bugnuts. Crazy. Oop-shoobie. Flip City. I wouldn't trust them any further than I could throw them at this point; it looks like 90% of the entire goddamn party is completely off the rails and willing to overthrown the Republic to keep their Orange God-King on the throne. 

That's NOT what I warned about back in 2016. That's a whole new level of crazy, and I have no idea how the hell you run a popular republic with that. I don't think you can. It's like you have two partners, and one wants to make a nice soup and the other wants to do human sacrifice and if their partner tries to stop them they'll shit in the soup-pot. 

There's REALLY no way to make that work.

But, short of putting the entire 75 million or so of them in a cage...how DO you make it work?

Hang on, because I have an uneasy feeling we're about to find out.

Petard

 So you might recall that over the summer we here in Portland were In Flames!!!

The antifa hordes were rampaging through our streets, the dead were rising from their graves, dogs and cats were living together, and only the Thin Blue Line of Portland Police Bureau was holding us back from being - even though we were, mind you, the President hissown self said so! - an "anarchist jurisdiction".

But...remember back in June? 

When I asked you whether we would face the brutally obvious reality that "policing" in the United States fucks with and kills poor and dark and mentally disturbed people at a ridiculously inflated rate? What we would do if no amount of "reform" had changed or would change that? What we would do now, after decades of useless wanking had left us with a Police Bureau that is a sort of Proud Boys Local #432 only all with blue clothing?

And I answered my own question with:

"I know for a fact that Portland Police Bureau has been the home for wannabe Klansmen and Nazis for decades...I knew perfectly well (that this) was so baked into PPB that the only way to "do something" would be to do a Saddam's Army on the whole outfit - just fire 99% of the sonsofbitches, burn the bastard to the ground, and start over?

Will we do anything about those problems now?

Don't make me laugh. You know better and so do I. We'll throw clubs and gas and "non-lethal" rounds at whoever makes a fuss. Christ on a crutch, we can't even do anything semi-intelligent about a fucking Plague, you think we're going to do anything sane about this, the miserable way we've treated our poor and our former slaves and current subjects, and everyone else who can't play the "get out of jail free" card?

Nope. I got nothin' for you on that."

And, as surely as the sun still rises, we - we here in "anarchist jurisdiction" Portland did...

Nothing.

Instead we re-elected the empty-suit-cop-fluffing incumbent mayor instead of his lefty challenger who promised to take the fucking cops by the stacking swivel. A large part of that was because us commies, once again, managed to form up the circular firing squad - another local activist, Tessa Raiford, ran a very organized write-in campaign that siphoned off about 13 percent of the vote, all from the Left - and shot ourselves dead square in the ass because it was in a race that the OTHER lefty candidate, Iannarone, lost 40 to 46 percent.

Do the math.

Fuck. We're our own worst goddamn enemies.

So the end result of all that protesting and voting and clamor for justice is that we're stuck with the same bunch of useless bastards that sat around with their collective thumbs up their collective asses while the Portland coppers went all kinetic on the BLM protestors.

Surely as the sun rises even the hardest-core street radical can see the brutal facts in front of her, so the protests drizzled away with the autumn rains.

The summer of BLM is over and the fucking cops won.

The usual suspects - the rich white people in the West Hills and the Portland Business Alliance - voted for the empty suit in droves, terrified of the propaganda spewed by the Thin Blue Line of Bullshit and the idiot news stations. 

The same idiots are fulminating about our homeless explosion - imagine, people are losing their squats in a Plague that is killing businesses and low-wage jobs! Whoodathunkit? - and want the empty suit and his cronies to "do something"...as if anyone can "do something" without a massive infusion of tax dollars and social and actual engineering - build cheap goddamn houses, you fools! - that the richie riches and the PBA will never accept or agree to.

Which will just mean more "homeless sweeps" where the coppers kick the hoboes out of wherever they are. They will just rise and scatter like a flock of scruffy starlings to land in someone else's tree until the sweeps come through again. It's the homeless version of the whack-a-muj that worked soooo well in Southwest Asia only with fewer command-detonated mines.

Nobody is willing to think their way out of this, largely because the actual stuff that works is difficult and expensive and time-consuming and even here in Portland we're Americans, by God, and we don't do difficult and expensive and time-consuming. Fuck that noise, we're cowboys and we think with our six-shooter. 

Meanwhile we're marinating in the Plague just like the rest of you, and our wingnuts are as wingnutty as the ones all over the country, squawking and clucking about freeedummmmm!!! while the 'rona tickles their nostrils and they strut around with their festering uncovered meatfaces belching their disease all over the rest of us. The dumb fuckers have invited Mister Grenade to the party while the rest of us try to just stay in cover long enough to duck their goddamn shrapnel until the vaccines arrive.

I'm just tired.

I'm tired of the Plague. I'm tired of missing my old life; my friends and my little joys and my city, tired of being worried and afraid and nervous as a cat around crowds, wondering which one is the fucking numbnuts is that's walking around shedding the virus like rain.

And I'm really tired of this country, which has such a bright and shining promise, which has the potential to be so good and great and one but instead is dominated by the selfish, the small, the weak, the stupid, and the willfully ignorant.

I'm tired of trying to be decent and intelligent and thoughtful and careful and judicious only to look across the way at a bunch of four-year-olds squalling in a tantrum triggered by belief in utter nonsense so transparently obvious delusional foolishnessthat even  a poop-flinging monkey would sneer.

And I have no good and happy answer to how to change all that except the answer of any siege; watch and wait and keep my head down and kill the traitorous bastards trying to open the postern and try and ensure that the other sonsofbitches don't get over the wall all the while knowing that it's usually us who get blown up by our own goddamn petard.

Acting 1SG Lawes reads the morning formation announcements

 Comp-ney, Atten-shun!

At ease.

Okay, listen up. Coupla things here.

First.

I am going to say this One. More. Time. and then I am going to simply lay back and await the next time one of you fucking heroes comes into my company area with "Stop the Steal" swag or I catch talking about martial law and then I am going to do to you what the wolf did to the farmer's wife when he caught her airing her unmentionables in the breeze and I promise you that you will not like it.

Look, people.

We had an election. If your people lost, I'm sorry. Too bad, so sad.

That's what fucking happens in a fucking democratic republic!

If y'all think back to when you were teeny tiny little baby soldiers, all cute and fluffy with all that facial hair like a fucking Nineteen Eighties porn star, and you raised your hand and swore to defend something against all enemies, foreign and domestic?

Remember that shit?

That thing you swore to defend was a Constitution, and it pretty much says straight out that We the People get to vote.

What it didn't say is that the people you like have to win that vote.

If it did, we would be Commieyunist Russia or Red China, and I know as the outstanding U.S. Army airborne soldiers you are that you would not want to fucking be that.

So.

Stand down, heroes. You'll get your chance in another four years, Gawdhelpus, and until then I expect you to shut up and soldier, and yes, I know that you've been hearing that shit from general officers, too, and that reminds me, what did I tell you about what happens when you cross general officers with gorillas, Sergeant Echevarria?

You get retarded gorillas, that is correct!

General officers, both as individuals and colectively, know about as much about electoral politics as a fucking cow knows about the fucking Council of Trent and no, Specialist Black, I will not explain that for you. That is what The Google is for as opposed to using it to search the phrase "Mila Kunis nude".

So do not come to me quoting general officers on electoral politics unless you wish me to consider you poorly educated and as gullible as a baby duckling. I would be morally and emotionally devastated if that were to happen.

I trust I need go on no further about this damn electoral nonsense.

Second.

I understand that there are certain elements in this formation who have had issues with the latrine facilities.

People, listen up.

We are still working under the "sequester" and yes, Specialist Black, I recommend you look that up on The Google, too.

We are issued a fixed number of rolls of DA-issue toilet paper per quarter. No more, no less.

This is based, and I have pursued this in-quiry all the way up to Division G-4, mind you, on a scientifical algorithm specially crafted at great time and expense by a civilian contractor of the Department of the Army that has calculated to the microgram how much used food you people are expected to deposit in the latrine holes per quarter.

Therefore, if you have exhausted the company's issue of toilet paper before the end of that quarter, then clearly the problem is that either, one, you have not been correctly trained in the use of DA-issue toilet paper, or, two, you are full of shit, since the nice gentleman at G-4 explained to me in excruciating fucking detail that the algorithm cannot possibly be wrong.

Therefore, I can provide this company with a block of instruction on the correct use of the DA-issue toilet paper, if you believe that will solve the problem.

Or this company will have to solve this problem for themselves.

You will note that I am not - repeat NOT - suggesting that individuals in this company might just happen find themselves in the Alpha Company area while in the possession of a capacious item of apparel such as a duffel coat capable of secreting several full rolls of toilet paper in such a way as to elide the notice of the Alpha Company CQ while exiting the billet and company area. 

That would be an underhanded suggestion and would certainly not please a certain First Sergeant whose infantry company has a reputation for being...remind me of the term, Staff Sergeant Harder?

Yes, I believe the term is "irritatingly swollen-headed little cockbites".

Until then I will continue to consult with Brigade about this issue.

Are we clear?

Good. That is all.

Comp-ney, Atten-shun!

Platoon sergeants, take charge.