Day 61: A Real President Sighting

It’s been a very melancholy day. My girlfriend was scheduled to walk in her graduation today, celebrating earning her Masters’s degree. That didn’t happen. She was really looking forward to it and so was I. Hundreds of thousands of #Classof2020 graduates and their families shared our pain.

But there was hope.

Barack Obama took to the primetime airwaves tonight, and for a brief moment, offered a tear in an alternate reality we have suffered through for the last four years.

His calming tone and utter lack of insecurity soothed a parched nation looking for a sparkle of light in the dark days ahead.

His speech had an incredibly odd, visceral effect on me. I could LITERALLY feel the chronically tense muscles in my body, loosen. I have hypertension and had I taken my BP, I promise it would have been normal.

We have come to accept the hatred and neo-fascism of the GOP and Trump as our new reality. Seeing former President Obama, and Malala, offer words of encouragement to a battered nation was profoundly healing.

That’s it.

That’s all I’ve got.

That’s all I needed…

 

PS: Congrats to the UC Berkeley Class of 2020. From civil unrest, fires, Earthquakes, smoke, PG&E power shutdowns, to COVID19, you have indeed earned your iconic status and a place in the history books. Fiat Lux.

Day 55: Murder Bees and Murder Cars

I’m no structural engineer, but I’m pretty sure this photo of my bike last Tuesday does not represent the preferred geometry of a road cycle.

But more on that later.

Murder bees, amirite? WTF.

Between wondering if the next presidential election will be compromised, the very first time in my 59 years I’ve even considered the possibility that our election may be illegitimate, and then fricking Murder bees…

And now we have Billy Bob and Jethro murdering African American’s in cold blood in the South. Lynching by Winchester. Yeah, I know, I’m late to the game. Most of my liberal, boomer cohort is late to this reality. We just KNEW this wasn’t our America. Until a vile, grifting, wannabe despot opened our eyes to a new and ugly world, that our privilege has allowed us to ignore.

Maybe the quarantine is a good thing. It’s allowed some of us to take a very hard look at how our perception of our America and how our new reality of America squares. News flash: it doesn’t. My gut tells me that despite the horrors we are collectively experiencing, that these hardships were/are a necessary corrective mechanism. God, I have to believe that, because if I don’t, desperation and cynicism will win the day.

This is our opportunity to fundamentally reshape our democracy for the better. But that won’t happen until folks like me, erstwhile liberals who have skated along waiting for the other guy to do the right thing, take a deep dive into the agenda of organizations like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. Because if we don’t step out of our freshly cut front lawn encapsulated hallucinations, we will eventually be at the mercy of the steadily rising fascist movement crawling out from underneath their rocks and finding agency in a new media landscape.

Fuck. This is depressing.

Back to the bike. On my lunch hour Tuesday, I decided to try to get an hour ride in at least three days per week to combat my predictably expanding waistline. Less than a mile in I was approaching a four-way stop sign and saw a pick-up truck approaching his stop on my right. I slowed down to nearly a stop and entered the intersection as I watchfully eyed the truck, out of sheer habit and a well-earned caution of Berkeley drivers. Sure enough, the truck never even slowed down, entering the intersection and turning directly into me.

Had I not anticipated this, I would have gone underneath the truck, just as my bike did, but seeing it unfold in slow motion, I was able to unclip from my pedals and ninja jump backward as the bike crunched under the front bumper. I literally landed on my feet, unhurt.

I’ll spare you the legal details, but a HUGE shout out to the witness that stopped and provided his name and phone number. His testimony to the insurance company solidified their ruling that the driver was 100% at fault.

I don’t recall if I’ve documented this on my blog before, but I suffer from PTSD (TL:DR, but it can be gleaned from previous posts) and this little incident unexpectedly caused it to rear its ugly head for the balance of the day. This is the second time in the last six months that a stressful incident has unleashed the PTSD symptoms. I’m sure some of it is simply aging, but I intend on checking in with a therapist specializing in PTSD to explore this more. I’m no hero and strongly encourage others to seek out mental health. Time for me to take my own advice.

Day 55. Nearly 80k Americans dead. Damn…

 

Day 48: The Other Pandemic

I’m absolutely gutted right now.

Writing angry is never good, but you’ll excuse the oversight.

I’m feeling pretty hopeless.

The photo above is of Courtney Brousseau. My daughter was a classmate of his in high school. In response to my text to her this morning, she said, “…he had more potential than most I knew at school.”

Courtney was murdered.

After an illustrious career at Newbury Park High School where he was the Editor of the same student newspaper that my daughter was Chief Photographer, he enrolled at UC Berkeley. My school. My alma mater.

He went on to a position of leadership in our student union, and a cursory google search demonstrates the extent of his engagement here at Cal.

There are over 40,000 students here at Cal, but despite his well earned high profile, I never knew him. I’m the poorer for it.

Courtney didn’t die from Covid19. Courtney was murdered in a drive-by shooting.

With a gun. The other pandemic.

The pandemic that we will go on to ignore once the Covid pandemic is but a distant memory.

The pandemic that is easily diminished through common-sense gun legislation. You know, like Canada did within a month of their worst mass shooting.

I’m fucking sick of the other pandemic.

Friends of my kids and a Sheriff’s sergeant that I used to work with were murdered in the Borderline Bar shooting in Thousand Oaks a few years ago. In the same bar where I proposed to the mother of my children.

Courtney is just the latest example of the other pandemic to affect me personally.

I lost a son five-years after a vehicle accident that became a high-profile media event in the same community Courtney was raised. I’d like to say I can’t imagine what the family is feeling right now, but I do.

Maybe the anger is a manifestation of the PTSD I continue to suffer as the result of his accident.

Maybe it’s just because it’s so fundamentally fucked-up that a young man with so much potential to make a positive impact in this dystopian world was cut down by another gun, while Covidiots roam the streets and the President acts like a petulant child on Twitter.

I’m so sorry for Courtney’s family. I’m so sorry for his friends and the Cal community that embraced him.

I’m devastated that his voice and his spirit was silenced.

This was posted hours before Courtney’s murder:

Everything’s okay for you now Courtney.

I wish I could say the same for us…