Dami Lare is a Thinker. Humanist. Realist. Theist. Independent Editor. A graduate of a school of his choosing. Writes from somewhere in Nigeria, Africa, with works previously published nowhere but can now be found in certain places (online and print). He is the co-founder of Lunaris Review, a journal of Art and the Literary.

 
 
                                                             
                                     The Man Myth
                                             (OF UTILITY AND INQUITY)
 
 
It could be said that it isn't love upon which the sturdiest of foundations are laid but the utility of merciful lies, which ironically serves as a sort of sacrosanct therapy to the troubles of diversity and opposition. As such, controversial notions like Will, Culture, Identity, Liberty, and Authority, chiefly explored from the remotest ages to the practical and theoretical dialogues of the millennial, and pushing forward new conditions in the process, obtain more as consequences – of these lies – than catalysts in the narrative of Man. A species that positions itself as conqueror of all and the self: the private space on which the utility is manifested. But in the same way that the triumph of humanity is defined by boundless dishonesty in boundless pursuit of boundless ideals, the Man, ‘un-knows’ the self in a futile lust to cast himself in the image of the other: that which is, at a point, and then indefinitely, impressed on him – by merciful lies – as superior/better/lust-worthy. This ruinous cycle is distinctive of a species faulted by the texture of its progress and the temper of its dialogues. Man, thus, ceases to exist in the light of a conqueror (of himself or the other), but as a transaction (duped) into constant and recurring strife. Plagued with the traumatic fortune of becoming and unbecoming, breaking down and sustaining, of remaining yet being the other, and of being soft within and hard without.
Navneet Alang, in his essay, ‘The Good Man is a Self Hating Man’, writes: "to be a man is to have arrived too late [...]: immersed and saturated in a thing out of its time." In contrasting yet somewhat complementary terms, I contend that to be a man is to be fated, ad infinitum, to a state of repeat, through desires impressed on him by (dismissible) exterior expectations, thereby fetching more as an object with broad functions and, thus, transmuting from entity to concept, like a myth. A 21st century myth.
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                                     Mummy, Dare n bu mi o.”
                                     “N se ni ko gba eti e.
That was my mum and one of my older sisters, dialoguing on the character of my insolence and measures apt to put to rest such impertinence. We were not older than 5 and 8 at this time – my sister and I. Yet to be initiated into propriety, but prudent enough to revere each other, as African culture demands.
Yet were the temper of an emergent mould of African culture, which seeks to disregard old dialogues and politics through radical posturing, anything to go by, the above incidence should exist only as bogus chronicle. A fraud in comparison to the 'supposed' reductive texts obtainable from the African space: texts whose elaborations on the private and public politics of the male-female gender are premised on the primacy of 'roles' and 'contexts'; texts maintained against the snags of globalisation, culture-contact, and evolution by functionalism and conformism.
But, as this protest tradition, likewise any other, conservative or novel, is never completely couched in its theories, the traction gained through its struggle is conversely proportional to its intent – perhaps as a result of monochromatic tenets which in the process of rupturing old, unfavourable practices carve spaces for new ones.
Hence, the contemporary, functioning as beneficiaries of this generational transaction have remained, by implication, upon receipt, and through time, custodians. And this way it has been till the insuperable juggernaut of the West came bounding with caustic intent. With its unfounded, pseudo-ubiquitous and falsely superior rationality that arrested respect and labelled it servile, deracinated the individual and erected the collective, ripped apart the old, structured collective and invented polarities, and remoulded the nucleus of Africa, diversity, into the degenerative, antagonism. The result which is the African outlook not only regresses but also becomes unpreserved. And in its place, a new variant of the culture, reliant solely on the West’s (modernist) instruments of opposition and deviancy becomes applicable to the African space. As such, the West’s fundamental themes of hero and prey and villain, of one mould being 'perpetually' and 'solely' subjugated by the other becomes principal.
This is best corroborated by the words of Julius Nyerere:

                  “that to minds moulded by the West’s [political] traditions, the idea of an                       organized opposition group has become so familiar, that its absence                                immediately raises the cry of dictatorship...it’s no good telling them that                        when a group of 100 equals have sat and talked...until they agreed [and                          “until” implies that they will have produced many conflicting arguments                          before they eventually agree] they have practiced democracy...”

From this point, it becomes more comprehensible how simple it is to impress the role of subjugator on a class and victim on the other; and how the western temper of modernism – of non-conformism and dissension – achieves its relevance.
But while the yoke of relevance is heavy that of sustenance is light. To attain the relevance of heroism, a thesis – villain – is invented. If pre-existent, the villainous charges are trumped up. In the instance where consensus concedes the villain as vanquished, to continually sustain the scheme, a lineage of villains is charted. This way the collective opposition remains pertinent, and the spirit of rebellion, even at its uttermost irrelevance, becomes integral.
The result of this post-colonial choreography is group-consciousness restructuring, which births a radical awareness where what was once norm exists presently as the periphery – incidences where respect is horizontal and the basis for interrelations are considered fabrications or at best, one-offs.
Being the only male child, and last born, of my parents should have subscribed my parents to some form of parental parochialism, but at no point in time was I made to feel superior or in any way special. In fact, it was the opposite as I was made to engage everything that would demean this theory. At a point I conceived certain animosity toward my sisters (and was appropriately dealt with). This contradicts the theories of the emergent protest tradition: that the male child is always treated special, more so, if he is one among many girls.
So one can only imagine the horror I felt years later, after being made (through implication) to respect the girl image, when an acquaintance (female) slammed me with the accusation, ‘all men are misogynist, sexist,’ because I was a boy – a male. In fact, later, it was propounded in certain literary gatherings that all males are the cause of female’s woes. I had felt like a relic of iniquity after that encounter – the thesis.
Perhaps Navneet Alang is right: the good man is one who is retro-active and apologetic for his nature, recognizing and correcting mistakes after the fact. Right as a prophet of the success of the new ideological occupation of the African space, for the very disappearance of male-stereotyping/subjugation in clinical, notional and academic discourses on gender, partially because of the inconveniences of its implications, chiefly because of the import of the anti-thesis in post-modernist purchases, is deconstructive of the origin of this emergent tradition.     
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Consequentialism is an elusive episteme in the pursuit of an absolute. Its ubiquitous employment rather than esoteric renders it a certified means to bias, since what is considered end/truth is often times the obligation of practice to certify. Consequentalism, hence, becomes defeated episteme at best, and at worse a nonsensical valuation, as the true arbiter of action remains wholly subjective, and what obtains as the ultimate present – end/reality/truth – is corollary of comparative judgements: what could have been in relation to that preferred.
This way the present is aggregate of a math of convenience; its character and utility are by no means adjudged independent of comparison. In this sense is the 21st century Man a relic, with functionalities outlined by comparisons. He is keepsake of all that could have been right and that has been wrong; the myth to sustain the narratives of what-ifs and whatnots. And he is never autonomous of this. He is preceded by these superscripts pre-conception. Like Sisyphus he is saddled with them upon formation and thereafter and indefinitely. His ascension into maturity is descent into the abscess of convenient truths – the purgatory of rehearsed history. Lauren Quinn in a personal essay on memory writes that: "Our minds have a funny way of re-writing history". The account of the 21st century Man is of a mythical figure whose purpose e is to (what Alang states unapologetically as) "purge himself of iniquity through self-hate".
But, at this point, a pertinent question arises: what iniquity? To this I would come presently.
Scientists fault the concept of repressed memory as fraudulent and near impossible, thus bemoaning unearthing memories (through therapy) as a chance at scientific charlatanism. By re-creating memories, there is tendency to rehearse memories, which are wholly deceptive and utter fabrications. Rehearsed memories are a patient’s projections founded through a series of intrusions – hypnotism and other modes of psychotherapy – to unearth buried events. The fraudulent part rests not only on the unempirical procedures but the recovered memories that are ideal fixes for whatever malaise had necessitated their purchase, considering the complexity, flexibility, and susceptibility of the human mind.
The therapist, armed with paraphernalia of psychotherapy, urges the victim of a distorted past through regenerative processes; the patient trapped in fraudulence projects 'convenient' images prompted by extrinsic, questionnaire-backed suggestions. An overwhelming force of re/creation ensues, birthing alien ideas that ingrain in the psyche as recalled events. To the patient, a repressed memory is remembered – but, truly, the patient is no less a zombie.
Another question that Quinn asks then tallies with the first: "what do we do with what we remember?" Of this and the previous I would explain together.
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The above, standing in its right as analogy and fact, mirrors the 21st century African cultural construct. There is an extrinsic influence (the therapist). There is a people (patient). There is the Man (the idea/image) re/created and hidden in the people’s psyche to account for particular narratives – in this case the thesis against which an antithesis must rise, which returns us to the instruments previously cited. Thus, the people, a particular class, conveniently transform into the antithesis – a zombie collective swayed by a controlling force (cultural and socio-political) that has made an alien idea integral through the process of induction and indoctrination (hypnotism). This zombie collective, like all patients/victims of rehearsed memories, seek penance, reparation, reprisal, freedom, and closure from the alien (myth) fashioned specifically to serve as sole cause of its grievances.
In a likewise sense does the 21st century Man exists, introduced by the protest tradition as a ready-made iniquity, culpable for whatever gender crimes are conceivable – this responds to the questions of iniquity and utility. His utility bears similitude to that of the fiendish phenomenon Baba-Yaga conjured to instil fear in children. Only his is of a construct inducing antagonism and opposition within adults.
In continuance of the foregoing, the 21st century Man is never fully independent of this baggage of utility and iniquity. It becomes chief that penance is sought if avoidance is desired: continuance in seeking to align with the antithesis and remaining in perpetual states of unbecoming (of himself) and becoming (of the other) is the rule of conduct. Only then does he achieve the grade of what Alang calls 'the good man', through a process of self-hatred, which Alang says is a good thing: a good man is a self-hating man.
But this process is never finite. Like Prometheus, his contrition is absurd, laborious, and eternal. Yet like Wu Su-Kong he is humbled for eternity, for it is impossible attaining the stately image of the other, no matter how he hates himself or identifies with the antithesis. He realises nothing is sufficient – that acts of penance can be adjudged dubious. This paradox sums his fate, what Susan Sontag, in her essay on Camus, 'The Ideal Husband', expresses as an absolute revolt that encourages limits. One from which is no escape. So any dissenting or consenting view to gender-oriented literature, or appropriately put, feminist literature, is his quota in sustaining patriarchy. A quota he must, nonetheless, do away with. A quota he inadvertently impels – like Oedipus, propelling the very narrative he tries to avoid through avoidance. Eventually, a Julia Kristeva’s or Adrienne Rich’s experience leaves him divided, ripping at the seams, effusively penitent and soused in self-pity as any of these is realised to him:
That to be alive is to have chosen one of two impossible choices: a boy or a girl. And to be the former is to be condemnable for institutional wrongs and supremacist agendas that he must grow to be culprit of – never a victim.
That to be alive as a boy is to have chosen to be privileged and to have been a scheming mind in a previous life (African Eschatology), with the contrivance to amass certain birthrights that typify instances of fraudulent origins.
That to grow up as a boy and have burdensome expectations of misogynist forebears and the society impressed on him is to be privileged by the repressive doings of the same fraudulent forebears. So he has no case.
That to be a boy is to be considered an over-ambitious heir of patriarchy who wishes to dominate. (Wishes prompted by delusional notions of delusional birthrights.)
That to be a boy is to be sole culprit of the humanity’s crimes and undoing.
That to choose to offer suggestions and correct institutional lapses is to make ethical pretensions from a favoured position, or to seek to understand gender plight is to be a pretentious bigot with a mocking intent. He can never truly understand feminism.
That to desire a girl with uttermost affection without having declared himself a feminist is to harbour ulterior motives that are misogynist.
That to be a boy and a human being is never enough: he has to be a feminist or a misogynist.
That to have grown among the female gender, loved and respected each is insufficient; restoration in form of a public disavowal, confessions of/to (generational) sins and dissociation from supremacist ideology is required.
That to be a boy is to be by default intimidated and emasculated by a woman’s success if she earns more or attains a higher rank.
That to hold women in high esteem and attempt to be chivalrous is to be a benevolent sexist – a pretentious sexist is no better than a vermin.
That his father is patriarchy and his mother is patriarchy, and everything he has known and has taught him to be the way he is patriarchy.
That all roads lead to being a sexist.
That to be a boy is to be nothing more than a potential gender terrorist – a readymade one.
Post-discovery, the 21st century Man initiates a war with the self – breaking down and sustaining. He is caught in an identity battle, a few steps shy of self-destruct. But sadly, this isn’t his only battle.
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                  You are not a man. You are too cold for a man. Men never do like this. Are                       you not a man? O n se okunrin o.

That is my father voicing his concerns. And my mother. And my sisters. My friends. My enemies. And pretty much everyone known to me.
The Neo-platonist in pursuit of the absolute, the perfect principle, realises 'beauty' as unattainable – that the ideal is a myth. (Beauty here figuratively translates as the ideal man.) Yet to this is a man made to aspire. The 21st century Man exists in this light, entangled in infinite processes of re-branding to fit a mould. He is continually aspired to two things: the other and an ideal state of himself – two impossibilities.
I have an inexplicable dread for insects that hop or fly. This my parents, especially my dad, do not understand. An 'emasculating' tendency it is. To imperfectly quote my Dad, a man petrified by insects is less a man. He says, "O n se Okunrin o – you’re not a Man." The word phobia is non-existent in his dictionary – an excuse for wimps. And, sadly, this doctrinaire reproach never terminates with arachnids, but expands to other outwardly manifestations of the self, ranging from physical exertions to inter-personal relationships – anything that requires a validation of me as a Man. Consequently, I am trapped by the need to aspire to a stately and plucky version of myself: which like the Neo-platonist I am unable to attain, for in my father’s eye (and every other person's represented) I am never yet a Man.   
A while ago, a friend’s father died, and because I possess acutely suppressive tendencies borne of extreme introversion I said nothing, conscious that nothing could be said that redeems loss. My dad upon hearing this incident queried if I knew. I said yes. He asked what I did. I said I did nothing. That I didn’t think there was anything I could say that would trump loss. He said I had to learn how to grieve, that I needed to be a Man. Was I a woman? There again, that need to aspire.
I know of a man, let’s call him J. J's relatives are of the opinion he is not man enough because at age 32 J is still a bachelor. J, embattled by the constant demeaning references to him decides to be a Man. Few months later he weds. But J discovers he has bedroom difficulties. His wife calls him an excuse for a Man: he isn’t a real Man. Humiliated by a thing that could be as natural a condition as breathing oxygen, he seeks help to be a real Man, and by any luck he is, but then he loses his job shortly. His wife calls him a pathetic man: real men provide for their families. And so it goes till death. Failure to be the perfect Man keeps him in constant aspiration toward impossibility. All his life, rather than live, J tries to be a myth.   
At this juncture, I dare point that any man, contemporary or otherwise, would have at a point taken delivery of this, or forms of it – being charged to be a Man, the ideal Man. Thus, if men, rumoured to be cushioned on the upside of existence by defective institutions, are themselves badgered by conservative expectations to be something other than their natural selves, it becomes no longer a faulty submission that a man isn’t all he is rumoured to be.
But, sadly, it is the fictitious, unattainable model (the myth) that scores of gender-theorists and feminists have sought equality with. A version supposedly ideal and graced with unnatural benefits, patriarchal, domineering, perfect, and superior – that is a myth. A 21st century construct whose appearance has launched the world into chaos; well-honed fairy tale that men, by being men, are made to aspire to, and that women, through collective notions of inequality, have advocated equality with.
A woman is obligated by faulty traditions to act like a Man.  In the same vein, a man is required to act/be a Man. This attests that a Man, in the sense propagated, is an unwise, impracticable and inaccessible generic cultural reference (myth).
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Most assuredly, the catalyst behind the exulting of this myth from fraudulence to relevance is the preponderance of collectivism in the millennial culture. Pixley Isaka ka Seme in a rhetoric published as the ‘Regeneration of Africa’ says: "Men [humans] have tried to compare races on the basis of some equality. In all the works of nature, equality, if by it we mean identity, is an impossible dream! Search the universe, you will find no two units alike." It is nearly impossible for a thing to be commensurate with another it shares vast degrees of differences (no identity) with. Everything is exclusive in its individuality. Perhaps it is the texture of the enterprise whereupon ideals are set. Perhaps it is the quality of such ideals. Perhaps somewhere along the trajectory of history, humanism has been swapped with ideologies. But the 21st century reality is that of an individual (what Stanberry expressly promotes as the unfathomable reality of individual consciousness) being trumped by the collective.
To give currency to this argument is to employ Nabokov’s ultimate question in Bend Sister: "...Which is more important to solve: the outer problem [space, time, matter and the unknown without] or the inner one [life, thought, love, the unknown within...]?” Stranberry in 'Nabokov and the Prism of Art' explicates that, "Far from claiming pride of place, neither Marxian social problems nor Einsteinian space-time can compete with Nabokov’s institutions of a higher consciousness behind the surface fabric of phenomena." Furthering the afore-going thought in its context is another excerpt of Nabokov on Karl Marx and his social theories in The Eye:

                            "Some mean-spirited little man decides that the whole course of                                  humanity can be explained in terms of ... the struggle between an empty                         belly and a full belly. Luckily, no such laws exist... Everything is fluid,                                 everything depends on chance, and all in vain were the efforts of that                                crabbed bourgeois, author of Das Kapital."


Replacing empty belly and full belly with a penis and a vagina, the hermeneutic logic, that the world’s challenges are too distinct, dynamic, and fluid to be simplified by notions (collective), that explain the universe as the dialectic of genders, becomes more unequivocal.
That the individual intellect and the grooming of the individual consciousness merit foremost consideration in intellectual dialogues that seek to explain the universe can never be overemphasized. Descartes’ submissions on reality in The Meditations that Corgito ergo sum – I think, not we think – is testimony to this; more so is the philosophy of the existentialist(s), Jean Paul Sartre, which is hinged on individuality. 
Another question that present itself then is: what really then is the purpose of the collective?
Professor Ali Mazrui’s in an essay on the role of the (African) intellectual attempts an answer that:

                       "It is sometimes said that the academic-intellectual should promote                          the national values. There is a lot to be said in favour of such a move.                               What ought to be borne in mind is that the majority of African                                           countries have not as yet evolved a body of values coherent enough and                         stable enough and intellectualized enough to be called national values...                       because we do not as yet have full coherent, stable and internalized national                  values, the task of the [ideologue] is not to indoctrinate the students with                     ideas which may be very transitory and impermanent. The task of the                             academic intellectual is to contribute not towards a definite doctrine at this                 moment in time but towards general intellectual sobriety. A combination of                faith and scepticism, sympathy and criticism, loyalty and nationalism, is the                   dialectic of the teaching process...”

​Sadly, the very opposite is what obtains in the emergent tradition.
To disregard a tradition (and its import) that positions itself to further the human condition, or a part of it, is foolhardy at best, and in reality an undoing. Yet, sweeping conclusions or the disregarding of the negative sensations and dialogues generated by such a tradition (and its import), however altruistic its intent, is a greater foolhardy and undoing put together. Such that only propels the very postures that have been dividing the human species. A classic case which Orwell describes as an effect becoming a cause, bolstering the original cause and producing the same effect, in a re-inforced manner, and indefinitely. A practical manifestation of the final stage of the Hegelian dialectic: the thesis-antithesis synthesis.
As an aside (as I have tried to avoid referring to this tag as much as possible, and yet it becomes integral at this point), a person once said: to not be a feminist yet profess support for the girl child is foolish. Another explicitly claims that to be a man and claim to be a feminist is deceptive and a scheme. The absurdity of these thoughts is revealing of the roughness of the age. One: humanism, in its strictest sense, predates feminism, or any other ideology whatsoever, and that is sufficient to dispel these thoughts. Two: the human character is naturally progressive, enough for the discernment of right and wrong, absent any external imposition. As such, if everyone were to commit to the advancement of the self first – and not the collective – ideas like those afore-mentioned would perish pre-inception.
The fourth question that recommends itself at this point is: is the human species capable of love without dependence on exterior factors for consideration and expression? If yes, every extrinsic mould of authority that channels thought is secondary, hence optional. For it is the unpremeditated implications of collective ideologies and monochromatic ideologues that grow an enterprise as banal as a myth into a fundamental ingredient of existence, which, fulfilling its mandate, has made merciful lies (of one thing being the source of grievance for the other) the foundation of contemporary reality, and not love.
It bears repeating that it is the purpose of the collective to transmute myth into man for the function of an irredeemable thesis, whence comes the struggle to be the other (woman/antithesis) for redemption. It is also the purpose of the anti-thesis that he remains himself, so that he may aspire to be a Man – a better version of himself. Thus he aspires for many things but attains nothing, and yet continues to aspire till death, for the sort of man who achieves this fusion successfully, if at all, is non-existent. A Myth.
 
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​                  The Life and Times of a Male Childminder
 
 
 
My childminding career lasted just over three years from July 2009 through to August 2012.  My previous employment was as a Learning Support Assistant with children who had learning needs within a Primary School setting.
My wife and I in previous years, learnt the devastating truth that we will never be able to conceive children of our own. After several painstaking years of exhausting all possible options of having our own children the route of adoption became clear to us if we were ever to have our own family.
Throughout 2007 and 2008 we persevered with the laborious trials and tribulations that are involved with an adoption process.  We supported each other through the terrifying panel meetings and we were ecstatic to be finally matched in 2008 with a two year old boy with severe Special Educational Needs.
My wife and I both had careers in education and employment involved in working with children.  We were both in full-time jobs at the time we adopted our first son and so I had the standard two weeks parental leave and my wife had the following nine months leave to look after our new son.  We made the joint decision in January 2009 it would make financial sense for myself to end my job in the Primary School at the end of the academic year in July and for my wife to go back to work in the September as she was on the higher wage.
As I still needed to earn a wage whilst looking after our son and with the background and experience I had of working in the Early Years it made practical sense to enrol as a self-employed childminder.  I completed the introductory course in childminding during the evenings in the final two months of my work at the Primary School.
During the summer of 2009, although I was registered as a childminder, I was required to get all my policies and procedures up to date, ensure my house and garden was inspected and safe to accept children and all my risk assessments, planning, evaluations, observations and activities were ready for the influx of toddlers and babies.
As well as the wonderfully unique experience of enjoying a summer with my new family with outings to the beach, theme parks, swimming and of course soft play, I prepared my new employment with great gusto and plenty of advertising.  I decided to give my new venture the name of ‘Laugh and Learn Childminding’ and designed posters, leaflets, car magnets and a whole host of stationary.
I researched in to how much I should charge and found that the local rate for a childminder was between £3.00 and £4.50 per hour.  Although I was educated to degree level and had over twenty years experience in working with children and young people I humbly set my prices at £4.00 per hour per child and £3.50 per hour for a sibling.
I was to look after the children alongside caring for our son whilst my wife was at work Monday to Friday and we would have the weekends to enjoy our time together as a family.  September eventually arrived after a busy and fun-filled summer holiday.  After extensive advertising online and around the local area I was expecting immediately to start getting enquiries and showing parents around our house and garden and showing off all my carefully prepared plans and policies.
The first day of my exciting new self-employed occupation had finally arrived and I was on tender hooks, eager to show the world how I can survive in a severely female dominated role. 
A visit to the park, lunch at home, an hours afternoon nap and soft play filled my son’s day with laughter and happiness.  My waking hours were filled with confusion and uncertainty of why my mobile phone hadn’t rang or why my home voicemail was not beeping furiously full of expectant enquiries.
Day two in to this new era of my life resulted in another fun-packed adventure with my 3 year old albeit with a varied array of activities to the previous day.  Again no contact was made to Laugh and Learn childminding from the childcare seeking world.  The barren void of communication continued through for the first week.
On Monday morning, on the first day of week two as a male childminder, approximately at 9.15am, I received a call from a mother seeking childcare…
After I politely answered the phone, she asked to speak to the childminder of Laugh and Learn Childminding.  The answer I received after responding that I was the childminder was as follows:
‘uh… oh, ok… I… I was just enquiring… Thanks,’
I listened to the dead tone of the phone for several seconds before returning the device to its base.
Puzzled at the response, I thought what I could say next time to continue the call for longer than the few brief moments I shared with my first ever call for my childminding services.
I received four more calls in the following two weeks, with similar anxious replies.  To prolong a phone call for more than the caller hearing a male voice before hanging up, I tried, when possible, for my wife to answer the phone.
The same response occurred however, when my wife, explaining that I was the childminder, the phone being passed to me and a rushed, garbled voice saying she only wanted to know prices or something similar before, again, hanging up on me.
This process continued for the next two weeks.  Now a month had passed since Laugh and Learn Childminding was launched and not one child cared for, part from my Son, had occurred.
Until one day in the middle of October, I received a call from another father.  He was in between jobs and as such was currently a full-time father for his daughter.  He required childcare for his daughter whilst he was job hunting, attending interviews etc.  We arranged a mutual convenient time for the tour around the house and garden to be taken by his daughter and himself.  A take-home booklet of policies and procedures was given after, what appeared to be a successful session.  I was told by the seemingly content father that he will ask his wife to ring me to arrange a time for her to meet me have a look around my house.   A day later I received the call, we arranged a time for her visit and she, as her husband, left seemingly happy at the services that I could provide in caring for their two year old daughter.  She did say, however, she was meeting two other childminders and would be in contact in the next few days.
The ringtone on my phone remained silent in relation to childminding, as did the landline for the following two days after the mother’s visit.  The third day brought her decision.  I answered the phone, whilst I was having lunch with my son.  I greeted her as I have been doing with all calls relating to my business as professionally as I thought I sounded. The response I received from her was as follows:
‘Hi Philip, we have decided we would love you to be our daughters childminder.’
The call continued arranging when to meet to fill out the contracts, drop off and pick up times, dietary requirements, etc.
My confused son was keen to return to his lunch after receiving a huge cuddle from his beaming dad.  I rang my wife with the news I had eventually acquired my first family to childmind for.  As a family, we celebrate achievement, regardless of how big or small and enjoyed an Indian take-away that evening.
Contracts were agreed and signed.  The first day was a great success and from then on was an absolute delight for my son and myself looking after the toddler.  The abrupt phone calls continued from the paranoid Mothers unaware of the irony that another male carer had put his faith in me to look after his daughter.
I continued to care for the young girl alongside my son up to and through the Christmas holidays without being able to add to my ratios.
As fate would have it, in early January 2010, I received a phone call from another father looking for childminding.  Again, he arrived with his daughter, met my son and myself and had the tour around the house and garden.  After a successful visit from his partner, my second minded child joined the Laugh and Learn roster.
The requirements from both sets of parents were such that my care for both girls did not intertwine on corresponding days.
Now my business was beginning to take momentum and I was a male childminder caring for two young girls, I naïvely thought the sexist, stereotyped filled phone calls from presumptuous narrow-minded mothers would decline.  My hopes to be accepted as an equal in this harsh, cynical female world were soon dashed as my capacity to childmind were limited to the two girls I cared for.  The enquiries continued to be brief and limited to excuses to end the call from the intolerant female voice on echoing disapproval from my receiver.
Throughout my three years and one month as a childminder I did also care for two brothers on occasion.  The times I looked after the boys amounted to around two days a month over a period of four months.
My knowledge of other male childminders equated to those who ran their business together with their wives or female partner, I have yet to meet another male childminder who works independently, but I am sure they are out there… somewhere…
I enjoyed my time as a childminder immensely and built up great professional relationships with the children in my care and their families, there is, however, an overwhelming lack of male carers within the early years in the United Kingdom.  It saddens me to report, until an adequate minimum wage is introduced and an equality for males to be accepted as the main carer for young children, this trend is, unfortunately, going to continue.
 
 

​Robin Wyatt Dunn lives in a state of desperation engineered by late capitalism, within which his mind is a mere subset of a much larger hallucination wherein men are machines, machines are men, and the world and everything in it are mere dreams whose eddies and currents poets can channel briefly but cannot control. Perhaps it goes without saying that he lives in Los Angeles.

​         PizzaGate and the state of American Democracy
 
 
It’s hard to know exactly what the good old Founding Fathers were thinking back in the day, before the Internet and the railroad and the Slurpee. Though, of course, we do know what they wrote.
 
Did they worry about a large and evil cabal horrendously devoted to raping and eating children? Well, they did worry about the Catholic Church, another charming institution devoted to child rape.
 
But then they also put that persnickety All Seeing Eye of Sauron up on the pyramid, the eyeball so provocative that Nick Cage had to steal it, and so insidious that generations of men decided to become Masons just like George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower.
 
Perhaps it’s more a question of:
 
When did we really become democratic?
 
And, when did we really start raping and eating babies?
 
A lot of this can be traced back to Gobekli Tepe, which is an archaeological site in southeast Turkey. It’s dated older than a lot of other stuff we’ve found (though of course there are older artifacts, including stone rings, in Africa):  about 9,000 BCE. That puts Gobekli Tepe at the cusp of agriculture, and we know from genetic studies that the chickpea and wheat now eaten the world over originated in Anatolia, quite possibly on the hill where Gobekli Tepe is, a name which means “Potbelly Hill.”
 
Gobekli Tepe shows up in other places too. It’s mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the great narrative poem of ancient Iraq. In Gilgamesh, Gobekli Tepe is referred to as the place from which the religion of Iraq originated: a mountain full of animals.
 
When we dug up Gobekli Tepe, we found huge numbers of animal bones. They had been buried along with the temple, to seal it up. So we were clearly eating a lot of animals there, probably sacrificing them too.
 
Gobekli is interesting for other reasons too, like the Pyramids and Stonehenge: some of the rocks are REALLY big, and archaeologists say they were designed that way in order to provoke the kind of religious experience which were clearly associated with the sites: i.e., ‘god is big, and you are small.’
 
What you’ve read so far is more or less the facts as we understand them, with a few left out that I may have forgotten, combined with the much larger number of things we don’t know yet!
 
But now for some speculation:
 
Although some social theorists will tell you that the class system as we know it, with rich and poor people and all the accompanying differences that come with that, was invented around the same time as agriculture, I argue that it goes back a lot further. That the idea of monarchy, and the idea of ruling families, is really really old, probably older than our species.
 
We know, for instance, that some monkeys practice hereditary privileges, and have a rigidly enforced class system, where “princess monkeys” have their pick of mates, and can actually pick food out of the mouths of lower status monkeys. The lower status monkey must yield to this, knowing that the whole troop will beat him if he refuses.
 
So, what does this have to do with PizzaGate?
 
Well, PizzaGate is very much about that oldest of historical questions: how did kings get so much power? And why do people tolerate the enormous abuses that come with kings, and king-like rulers?
 
Because, on the one hand, Hillary Clinton, John Podesta and their friends raping, killing and eating little children is just like little princess monkeys reaching into slave monkeys’ mouths for an extra morsel of food:  the powerful ape wants something the weak ape has, and uses the threat of force to get it.
 
But on the other hand, even though we’re monkeys evolutionarily, we’re not ONLY monkeys in practice. You know, we cook and stuff. (And no, I don’t mean Spirit Cooking. Some theorists do argue that cooking is really the only thing that separates us from the animal kingdom, since we now know animals have complex language, just like us, and practice a form of science, of knowledge transmitted through the generations, just like us).
 
So yeah, fire. Control of the elements.
 
And, no coincidence here:  Satan is the original fire god. He is Prometheus, the fire bringer.
 
This brings me back to another interesting factoid l left out earlier: the Yazidi people, who Obama so kindly saved from genocide by Isis (I guess we can forgive Obama helping to create Isis a little, since he did clearly work to stop this particular genocide . . . . .  maybe? Maybe not?).
 
The Yazidi are interesting for all kinds of reasons, not least of which is that their calendar is one of the oldest recorded (I think it goes back about 8,000 years), and they recognize the gods carved into the stones at Gobekli Tepe: they know it was their ancestors who worshipped there. And the Yazidis, who are called devil worshippers by Isis, do in fact worship a Satan, from way back before he was Satan, but a guy named Melek Taus.
 
Melek was the peacock angel, the proud one, exactly like Satan, and Prometheus, who defied the gods and helped humanity out. Gave us fire.
 
So we can imagine, with some justification, that the work being done in the underground in Gobekli Tepe was centered around this central fact of our existence: our control of fire, and how this separates us from the rest of life on earth.
 
This idea of a separation is an important one: what does it mean to be separate? How separate are we? And if we’re separate, do we have to stay that way? Is it permanent?
 
Because on the one hand you can understand a great joy and pride that comes with this separation: you can see it in Genesis and in other stories, religious and not, of dominion over the plants and animals of earth, and our special relationship with this environment we share. But it also makes us lonely, and it’s probably why so many of the religions of the world are centered around us basically playing dress-up, and pretending to be things we’re not (trees and animals, often enough).
 
But for the ruling class, these little princesses and princes who in the Stone Age were getting, already, much of the same privileges our rich folk get now (better food, more sex), this idea of separation was crucial:  even as fire set humanity apart from the rest of life, these princesses and princes were set apart from the rest of humanity.
 
And of course, any student of history, art, or literature will tell you that the course of all of those things, the course of humankind as we know it, is centered around this incredibly awkward question, of justifying the privileges of the ruling class.
 
And, I would argue, a lot of the discussions centered around these privileges, and the practices which are put in place to protect them, start at Gobekli Tepe.
 
It is no accident that PizzaGate blew up so big in Turkey.
 
It is no accident that one of the pedophilia symbols, seen at Comet Pizza, is a crescent.
 
The evil privileges of the ruling class, the same privileges that allow monkeys to take the food out of their cousins’ mouths, the same privileges which allow Popes to rape children and lie about it, the same privileges which allow DC insiders to photograph kill rooms, walk in freezers, label those photos with truthful hashtags about their murderous intentions, and expect that we will do nothing to combat  their grave hubris and evil, these privileges and their expression were likely begun in southeast Turkey.
 
Or maybe they go further back.
 
But I do not believe that aliens gave us the secret code word, like an Arthur C Clarke monolith. I believe that intelligence is shared, even as life is shared on earth. And how we moderate and express these shared intelligences and shared lives on earth is an ongoing conversation, one that the Internet has made very interesting, but one that is ultimately very old.
 
Because again:  like our dear friend George Carlin said, the rich are different than you and me. It’s a big club, and you ain’t it! But why does the club exist? And what is the cost we are willing to pay to maintain this club?
 
In the late 19th century, it was considered that the class system would soon collapse, because it was so clearly unscientific, irrational, and unfair. Edward Bellamy’s groundbreaking early science fiction novel from the 1890s, Looking Forward, Looking Backward, imagined a future, essentially a communist Boston, free from the predations of what we are now beginning to see as the PizzaGaters.
 
But Boston does not look like Bellamy envisioned it.
 
This now coming is our American-French revolution. Back in 1776 Americans’ may have been over taxes, but for the French it was about the privileges of the rich, about prima nocte and all the same shit CNN is censoring now:  rich psychopaths up in their chalets, drinking virgin blood, eating little kids, and worshipping evil gods.
 
One more quick word about “satanism” : Now, I’ve never drawn a pentagram and tried to summon Baphomet, which, according to some of my friends on Facebook, is pretty hard to do, but fun.
 
But my Facebook friends are what you might call casual pagans, horror writers who like a little frisson in their lives, who might like writing stories about eating babies, but are just as nauseated as you and me by the real thing.
 
What’s the difference between pretend and the real thing? Why did that Catholic cardinal in St. Louis say “he didn’t know it was against the law for priests to have sex with children”?
 
What is the nature of this Big Club? Why do the rich exist?
 
The strongest argument to me is one seen through our evolution, and we can see it echoed in other species, in more of those David Attenborough nature documentaries where princess monkeys and their friends show up.
 
I believe it’s in The Life of Mammals where Attenborough follows some of our tiniest cousins, tiny little simians about the size of your fist, who live in tree trunks, are nocturnal, and subsist almost entirely on insects which they grab and force into their sharp little mouths. Because they’re so small, and because they live together on just one or two trees, they’re very vulnerable to predators. So when danger shows up, it is the Big Mommy and Daddy monkeys who are given the sole privilege of giving the “come on home” signal, so they all know to run for their lives at the same instant.
 
When you’re not at the top of the food chain, your communication infrastructure (another word for “tiny voiceboxes of little tree monkeys”) is of paramount importance. Whoever is trusted with that duty to ring the ‘come home bell’ is trusted with the lives of all the little monkeys on the tree. You can’t have multiple monkeys crying wolf: only one is allowed to do it.
 
We can imagine that humankind gained similar benefits over the course of our evolution:   in those split second moments where danger is imminent, you need to have a trustworthy actor who calls the shots, on whether to fight or flee.
 
But now our modern world is a world where most dangers (barring the occasional shark attack), are of our own creation. We are the problem; not bears and wolves.
 
As Bellamy understood, and Marx before him, and the revolutionary French peasants before them both: the rich are the biggest problem we have.
 
All of that privilege—and, not coincidentally, it is also tied in, at Gobekli Tepe with white privilege, because it was wheat that made us white. Melanin mutations occur subsequent to adapting an agrarian wheat-eating lifestyle; we know that the earliest inhabitants of Finland, for instance, the Sami, originally had brown skin— all of that privilege is coming home to roost.
 
Satan—remember, only a metaphor for fire, for our control of nature—has come home to roost. We are our own worst enemy.
 
To combat this problem of humanity against humanity we must start with those the loveable Dan Quayle once called “the best of us.”
 
It is “the best of us” who steal children away in the night, drink their blood, eat their flesh, photograph their deeds, and do so as part of the desperate 10,000 year old illusion that they are the children of the sun, the children of a special god, who are separate and distinct and better than all the rest of life on Earth.
 
We may be better technologically than the rest of life on Earth (at least, crucially, at our scale), but we can hardly be seen as better given all our other failings. Especially our moral failings, which is perhaps too polite a term to apply to PizzaGate. Our moral abysses.
 
We have allowed PizzaGate to happen because of a failure of imagination.
 
Because, in some horrible black-satire version of Fiddler on the Roof, we have chalked baby-eating up to “tradition,” and left it at that.
 
I know that one problem is we’re all facing now is, naturally, that not enough people believe the stories of what “the best of us” have been up to in their DC basements. But I think we will overcome that problem. The evidence will only keep growing.
 
The larger, and more profound problem is the one I’ve outlined here: our relationship to our own human privilege.
 
The American revolution was about a lot of things, but it was about in part the systemic curtailing of that human privilege.
 
I don’t believe that all Masons eat babies any more than I believe all Democrats do. Any more than I believe my “Satanist” horror-novel writing friends eat babies. A fondness for Baphomet and other pagan nature-idols doesn’t equal PizzaGate and its evils.
 
No, PizzaGate is explicitly about the rich, and humankind’s long, long, long march (we’ve had fire for ONE MILLION YEARS, remember, since homo erectus) from Africa out into the world.
 
The networks which homo erectus established in his long marches around the world (and he did make it at least as far as Java, on foot!), are the trading networks which Gobekli Tepe, and other early agricultural footprints at Iran and Georgia, helped to cement, and which became the international capitalist networks we know today.
 
We have been doing this a long time, but as we’ve been noticing, our time may almost be up, if we do not foment, dig in, and consider with utmost seriousness the reasoning behind a world revolution. Not necessarily for communism, not necessarily for socialism, or anarchism, or any ism, but simply against the enormous privileges of the rich.
 
The privileges of the rich are what became white privilege. If all men are created equal, if John Locke is still right, if the Enlightenment is still right, along with its problematic Masonic eye that Nick Cage likes so much he wants to steal it, then we need to act.
 
We must end what it means to be rich, so that, for future generations it becomes impossible for a CEO of Reddit to blog about eating human flesh and get away with it, so that it becomes impossible for major political figures to email asking for their pizza-related map on their handkerchief back, and so that we monkeys can no longer reach into each other’s mouths to take the half chewed food out, because there will be (as there has already been for a long time, economists know) enough food for all.
 
Enough for everybody’s two and a half kids. Haitian and American. African and French. Belo-Russian and Vietnamese.

Donal Mahoney, a native of Chicago, lives in St. Louis, Missouri. He has worked as an editor for The Chicago Sun-Times, Loyola University Press and Washington University in St. Louis. His fiction and poetry have appeared in various publications, including The Wisconsin Review, The Kansas Quarterly, The South Carolina Review, The Christian Science Monitor, Commonweal, Guwahatian Magazine (India), The Galway Review (Ireland), Public Republic (Bulgaria), The Osprey Review (Wales), The Istanbul Literary Review (Turkey) and other magazines. Some of his work can be found at http://eyeonlifemag.com/the-poetry-locksmith/donal-mahoney-poet.html#sthash.OSYzpgmQ.dpbs
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Clemencio Montecillo Bascar was a former Professor and Vice President for Corporate Affairs of the Western Mindanao State University. He is a recepient of various local, regional, and national awards in songwriting, playwriting, poetry, and public service. Several of his poems had been published in international literary magazines and journals such as, Foliate Oak , BRICKrhetoric, About Place, Torrid Literature, Mused-theBellaOnline Lietrary Review, and The Voices Project. He had written and published by the Western Mindanao State University two books of poetry, namely; "Fragments of the Eucharist" and "Riots of Convictions." In the Philippines, some of his poems appeared in the such magazines as Women's, MOD, and Chick.  
At present, he writes a column in the Zamboanga Today daily newspaper and resides at 659 Gemini Street, Tumaga, Zamboanga City, Philippines. He is married to the former Miss Melinda Climaco dela Cruz and blest with three children, Jane, Lynnette, and Timothy James.   

 
 
           PH DOES NOT OWN MINDANAO AND SULU


I wouldn't mind if people would again call me names such, "wise monkey," "creator of chaos," "charlatan," or purveyor of falsehood for writing this articel. I have long accepted and lived with this unsavory and demeaning reputation. However, just to soften or lighten the negative impact of these monickers prejudicially attached to my name, may I quote two internationally respected and acclaimed authorities  attesting to the historical truth that Mindanao and Sulu were not colonial posessions of Spain by virtue of conquest for which reason I am boldly asserting that the Republic of the Philippines until now does not legally own Mindanao and Sulu.
"THE SPANIARDS NEVER SUBDUED THE INHABITANTS WHO THEY CALLED MOROS; THEY WERE A FIERCY INDEPENDENT PEOPLE WHOSE CULTURE WAS THE MELTING GROUND OF SEA TRADERS, SHELL PRODUCERS, FISHERMEN, PIRATES, AND SLAVE TRADERS."- NEW ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA, VOL.11, COPYRIGHT 1989, P. 381.
"MOST OF MINDANAO AND SULU WERE EXCLUDED FROM PHILIPPINE TERRITORY DURING THE SPANISH TIMES. SPAIN CLAIMED SOVEREIGNTY OVER THEM, BUT ONLY A FEW COASTAL AREAS WERE REALLY UNDER ITS CONTROL. THE MOROS WERE NOT CONQUERED."-GREGORIO F. ZAIDE (RECOGNIZED AS THE FATHER OF PHILIIPINE HISTORY), AUTHOR OF THE TEXTBOOK ENTITLED, PHILIPPINE HISTORY AND GOVERNMENT, COPYRIGHT 2004, P. 63.
I will only give way or yield to the argument that Mindanao and Sulu are legal components of the Republic of the Philippines if these two authorities I cited above shall have been refuted and declared by competent and internationally recognized research and history experts to be charlatans and liars. Let me lay the historical premise in defense of my assertion that Mindanao and Sulu still belong to the "Moros," the generic term used by the Spaniards and also the Americans to refer to all the indigenious inhabitants of Mindanao anf Sulu.
Contrary to the popular notion that the Spanish sovereignty over Mindanao, Sulu, and the Philippine Islands was surrendered to the Americans on August 14, 1898, a day after the conduct of that morally and militarily questionable  Mock War between the ground forces of Spanish Governor-General Fermin Jaudenes and  US Army Commander, Gen. Wesley Merrit as scripted and choreographed by a Belgian Consul, Edouard Andre, it was at Fort Pilar, Zamboanga, that the ultimate and decisive battle for the defense of Spanish sovereignty took place and finally collapsed on May 18, 1899. It was on this historic date when the last Spanish Governor-General Diego de los Rios surrendered and turned over the sovereignty of the Spanish Crown over Mindanao, Sulu, and over the Philippine Island in accordance with the formal military traditions, ethics  and laws of war following the capture of the biggest Spanish fortress in Mindanao, Fort Pilar, by the Zamboanga Revolutionary Army composed of  Voluntarios, Deportados, and native warriors {most notably with manpower and logistical support from  Hadji Abulla Nuno, a hihgly respected Muslim leader of Taluksangay}  under the unified command of Gen. Vicente Solis Alvarez, according to the historical account of a noted and highly respected historian, Dr. Rony Bautista and confirmed by no less than the former Chairman of the National Historical Institute (now National Historical Commission), Esteban A De Ocampo, quoted in part, as follows:
"The capture of the Spanish fortress by General Alvarez throws new light into why the Americans were forced to proceed to and stay in Sulu although the specific order of American General Elwell S. Otis was  for the troops to occupy Zamboanga. It was important to the American colonial interest to have a firm control of it because the Spanish governor-general Diego de los Rios had established in Zamboanga the de jure sovereignty of Spain over the Philippines; and the transfer of Spanish sovereignty to Filipino hands."
The surrender of Gen. Diego de los Rios, the last Spanish governor-general of the Spanish Colonial Government of the Philippine Islands on May 18, 1899 at Fort Pilar, Zamboanga, undoutedly and irrefutably marked  the full recovery of sovereignty and indpendence of Mindanao, Sulu, and the Philippine Islands from the Spanish Crown. By virtue of the Law of Conquest, the Sultanates of Sulu and Maguindanao (Mindanao), recovered fully their statehood, the same legal basis used by the Spaniards in acquiring possession and control over some areas they succesfully conquered, colonized, and Christianized.
Even if there was no actual surrender of Spanish sovereignty by General de los Rios to General Alvarez, the order of the Spanish Crown to evacuate all colonial forces from Mindanao and Sulu during the early days of May, 1899, as contained in the annual report of the US War Department, 1 Part 4, p. 131 of Gen. Elwell Otis, such evacuation of Spanish forces, unmistakably marked and indicated also the time of the full recovery of the Sultanates of Sulu and Maguindanao of all the areas previously conquered and occupied by the Spaniards.This was also the time when these two Sultanates fully regained and re-assumed their statehood which occurred before the arrival of the American forces in Mindanao and Sulu for the Internatinal Law of Conquest succinctly states that " Conquest does not, per se, give the conqueror plenum dominium et utile, but a temporary right of possession and government" which to my personal understaning means that the moment an occupying or conquering foreign power withdraws from the territories they previously exercised de facto control, the ownership of these territories revert to their original owners which occurred before the arrival of the American forces on May 19, 1899 in Jolo, Sulu.
With the foregoing historical facts, it is logical to infer that the occupation of the American forces starting May 19, 1899, was contrary to the 1787 US Constitution because of its explicit provision prohibiting a war of conquest and the reality that Mindanao and Sulu were not conquered by Spain and were not her colonial possessions but were included in the sale and cession of the Philippine Islands to the United States under Article 111 of the December 10, 1898 Treaty of Paris only by lines and coordinates. Besides, the US Congress only authorized war with Spain and her colonial possessions, the declaration of war of which was officially issued on April 25, 1898. MIndanao and Sulu were not covered by such declaration of war issued by the US Congress and therefore, were not parts of the theater of war between Spain and the United States. There was absolutely no military necessity for the American forces to occupy Mindanao and Sulu for these two states were not also  military or political components of Gen. Emilio F. Aquinaldo's First Philippine Republic which declared war with the United States on Febuary 4, 1899.
Since  Article 111 of the December 10, 1898 Treaty of Paris was the only diplomatic document used by the framers of the 1935 Philippine Constitution as the historical and legal basis to define its national territory, it is my contention that the inclusion of Mindanao and Sulu, was also without  validity for these territories were not colonial possessions of the Spanish Crown by virtue of conquest or other modes of acquisition and ownership leading me to further postulate that until now Mindanao and Sulu still belong to the royal heirs and adherents of these two ancient unconquered Islamic kingdoms. This being the historical fact, the Republic of the Philippines, most especially Congress, does not have the right to enact any law that will create a political entity without the explicit consent of the de jure owners of the Sultanates of Sulu and Maguindanao, the royal heirs and adherents.
​

​ 
 
                        The Rules of Running the Roads
 
 
                I once saw Jesus at a rest stop somewhere outside of Marion, North Carolina.
             The rest stop bustled with people, young parents and children on vacation, little girls dragging stuffed animals to restrooms and old couples strolling by the fountain while a fat security guard sipped a Coke and kept a lazy watch. I sat on a stiff wooden bench for what felt like hours, watching the people walk by, lost in their own happy little lives. There was no room for anger or confusion here. My blood-red hair shone in the sun and drew attention like a child misbehaving in church.
            It was the tail-end of summer, 2014, after my sophomore year of college. I was headed back to school, which for me meant a six hour road trip along the backbone of my state. A long drive to make all alone, so I usually talked to myself throughout the trip, thought through possible stories I could write, the latest conversations I’d had, what I would say to my mother if she started asking me questions I wasn’t ready to answer yet.
        If I was in a good mood, I imagined that God Himself tuned in to my rambling road thoughts, and I fancied my inner monologue to be something like a prayer.
 
         Finally, after a quick stretch break I threw a quarter in the burbling fountain and tossed the empty container of my “Road Food”—an 8 ounce bottle of Nesquik strawberry milk. I made two wishes on my one quarter cause I figured by now that God owed me one.
           A minute later, I pulled out of the long diagonal slot in my small SUV, rolled my windows back up and mentally prepared myself for another hour or so of driving. My attention was so focused on getting back on the highway that I didn’t notice the giant truck come lumbering up the wrong exit ramp until I was staring it right in the headlights. In a split second, I said a prayer for real—God get me through this—and swerved right as hard as I dared. The truck roared by on my left side and scraped the Fire Engine Red paint from my front bumper. My hands shook in the driver’s seat as I pulled my vehicle to a hurried stop. The other driver slowed his car as well, a massive green pickup truck that looked like it had aspirations of becoming a Hummer when it grew up. The blocky mirrors on the truck stuck out so far they looked like landing gear.
         From what I could tell the occupants were a father and son pair, both looking frantic and gesturing wildly as they spoke to each other in the front seat.
      I jumped from my car, unharmed, though somehow I felt the impact in every sinew and ligament in my left side. The giant truck shivered. Its driver’s side door flew open with a creak and a slam. The son got out but the father did not.
        The driver lurched over to me while I knelt by my bumper, examining the long, violent scratches on my car. The rest stop seemed quiet now; the birds had stopped singing.
           The closer he got, the more I realized that the man looked exactly like Jesus.
                                                                       ***
        My mother has a unique saying for everything, from words that make sense but leave a terrible taste in your mouth like “slickum,” in reference to condiments on a sandwich, to words that must be entirely of her own invention, like “vomick” in place of the word “vomit.” If my mother is particularly angry at me, she will most likely invoke my favorite expression, “running the roads.”
         She always uses this in reference to me and my tendency to drive around town “with no good reason at all.” “You’d save a lot more money if you quit running the roads at all hours of the night!” she’d scream at me on the phone while I sat in my dorm room, cowering. “Why do you do it, why are you driving so much? What’s wrong with you?”
         I think what she was really asking me was what do you have to be running from all the time?
                                                                       ***
           Earlier that summer, I told God to mind his own business when I started the disastrous period of my life that I refer to as “that time I tried to internet date.”
           I felt desperate at the time, loose around the edges. It felt wrong to be banished to the depths of such an inane practice, but I saw no other choice; there were no gay-friendly areas within three or four hours of my small hometown. I could imagine what my mother might say in an alternate universe where we could talk about such things—If there’s nowhere for it to be done, then God doesn’t want you to do it.
          For my whole life, God has told me what He does and doesn’t want me to do. At least, His people have told me the rules. At nineteen, it finally occurred to me that maybe it was people that had been putting words in God’s mouth, not the other way around. Maybe all those years of vacation Bible school, Sunday church lessons, Wednesday night youth groups, and Friday morning chapel services had simply made me desensitized.
          A few months before my meeting with rest stop Jesus I’d finally started admitting to myself my less-than-Godly feelings for the same sex. I had been a Good Christian girl up till then, never stepped out of line or spoke out of turn. I remember being sixteen years old and describing myself as “submissive” to my high school principal, being proud about it, like it was a good thing, because God told us to be humble and obedient, especially the girls.
                                                                 ***
            The first Internet Girl I met in real life scared the shit out of me. Her name was Mona, and I only knew a few things about her—she had a massive pile of long dark hair that hung past her hips, multiple piercings, and a mother that didn’t care about her at all. And she was attracted to girls, like me.
           I drove half an hour to a Dunkin’ Donuts in Havelock, NC, to meet her. My hands shook during the whole drive. I told my mother that I was going to hang out with one of the girls I knew from work. There was no way I could go without lying to her about it, which made my already anxious mind creep into overdrive. Multiple times I thought about turning around and going home, but I felt in my bones that doing so would only postpone this day, not eliminate it.
         I met Mona for coffee. This particular Dunkin’ Donuts was situated right beside the airport, so as I parked I could hear airplanes take off and land, the sound so loud it appeared to echo off every building and car on the crappy strip mall. Mona ordered a fancy frozen latte. I got a regular black coffee. I never went to Dunkin’ Donuts; I had no idea what you were supposed to order there.
          “I’m so glad you could come,” she said. Mona held her giant coffee in one hand, wearing jeans and a t-shirt, looking for all the world like she belonged there. I wore my best black lace romper, too much makeup, my hair freshly dyed and curled around my face. I was clearly overdressed.
       Until that summer I had kept my hair blond, never wore makeup, and assembled outfits out of goofy mismatched sweaters and shorts over colorful tights. I always thought they went together well even though friends and teachers liked to make jokes about them. This summer I fashioned a version of myself that looked polished but cold. I appeared put together, yes, but one tug at the right place at the right time would’ve pulled me right apart.
        I said, “Me too,” to Mona, but I didn’t really mean it. I felt squirrely, hunted, watched, like I was on some terrible reality show. Why did I come here again? Mona was very open to talking about her sexuality; she seemed relaxed about it in a way that I couldn’t imagine. She wore a rainbow button on her t-shirt; I couldn’t even say the word “lesbian” out loud without visible pain and discomfort.
         For her part Mona tried to lighten the mood—she made jokes about coming out to her friends, talked about all the different girls she’d dated, and insisted that if I stuck around, I would “love the things she could do with her tongue ring.” All the while I sat silent with caged eyes, excused myself to go to the bathroom three times, and constantly surveyed the store as if my mother were going to come rampaging through the doors at any moment.
                                                                     ***
          Gay. The idea was an abomination in my church, and a joke in my household, if it was ever mentioned at all. Some of my earliest memories of the concept of “gay” are images of my mother, cleaning the house while listening to Clay Aiken on the stereo, talking about how “what a shame” it was that he turned out to be a “queer,” how disgusting, how sad. My mother, sitting on the green couch in our living room in the near-dark, watching Ellen Degeneres dance around tables, saying “she’s a queer, you know.”
          I didn’t know, had no idea what that really meant, just that gay was bad, dirty, something to keep secret.
          And I did keep it secret, even from myself, until finally in college my world expanded past my dark living room and my private Christian school and I realized the feelings I pushed down would follow me around. For more than a year, and that summer in particular, I could not reconcile the meek girl I was with the questioning, volatile, confused person who was seeping out of my skin. Nothing made me feel better. Crying only dried my eyes out, getting angry only left me with ripped sweaters I could never mend, and no matter how many times I cut and dyed and re-dyed my hair, I never left the salon with the feeling that I’d gotten what I came there for.
           I did not beg God for forgiveness because I was not sure yet if this was something that I wanted to be forgiven for.
                                                                      ***
            “Are you okay?” Mona asked. “You look like you’re being stalked.”
         I felt like I was being stalked. “Does it get any better?” I asked. It was so vague, but I thought she might understand what I meant.
         It was quiet for a moment. For some reason there was a gaggle of people in Dunkin’ Donuts right then, about 2 o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon, and they’d all chosen this moment to hush their conversations and look to their cell phones. It was so quiet I could hear the sound of coffee and ice making its way from Mona’s cup to her mouth as she took a pull from her drink. Her piercings winked at me in the glint from the sun shining in through the window.
         “I don’t know if it gets better,” she said, toying with the piercing in her eyebrow. “But it does get easier.”
        I didn’t exactly feel uplifted, but I did feel a little more relaxed after that. I mentioned my overly religious mother, my workaholic tendencies, my obsession with obtaining the perfect shade of red hair. Mona seemed amused by all of it. For a little while I felt calm, in control, like maybe I could do this, this whole gay thing.
         “I should probably get going,” I said, even though I had blocked out precisely six hours for this particular outing and I was only midway through hour number 2. I was ready to leave, ready to get moving again.
        As I was getting up to leave it hit me once more what was at stake—what my mother would do if she had any clue what I had really been doing, the way she would call me “queer” like she had Clay Aiken and Ellen, the fights we would have, the quiet sham of a life that would be impossible for me to continue. I thought of God and wondered if He would still listen to my rambled road prayers if he knew who I really was. I sobbed. In the middle of Dunkin’ Donuts, in front of this Internet Girl I’d never met before, I sobbed and ruined all that makeup I had so painstakingly applied just hours before.
         Mona was infinitely too nice about being cried on by a stranger. She patted my back and went to the bathroom to get me paper towels. I sat there mopping my eyes in Dunkin’ Donuts, wishing I’d worn considerably less eyeliner. No one was even looking at me. I wasn’t sure what strange new world I had entered, where someone like me, a girl who kept her emotions locked up tighter than the devil’s choker, could end up crying in front of a strange lesbian with mammoth hair and a tongue piercing.
          Regardless, after my eyes were dry I crawled up into the lap of my car and ran the roads for another hour at least. I wasn’t ready to slow down and let my feelings catch up with me, and the road wasn’t ready to give me up just yet.
                                                                      ***
          Back at the rest stop, Jesus was getting closer.
      Rest Stop Jesus had a long, scraggly beard, watery brown eyes, and he looked truly, unfathomably sad. He had some weird lined tattoo on the sides of his neck, something long and angular that reminded me of the gills on a shark. He tried to speak to me, but his words came out in a sloppy, broken English.
          “So sorry,” he said with his hands waving in the air. “Did not see you!”
         “You were going to the wrong way!” I looked at Jesus hard in the face. “You could’ve killed someone.”
       Jesus looked appropriately guilty. He reached into his pocket and pulled out something square, shiny, and teal. It took me a minute to figure out it was his wallet. He was rooting around in the different compartments when I backed up and shook my head.
         “Forget about it,” I said and shooed him away.
         I didn’t want money or retribution from Jesus anyway.
      He for one looked extremely relieved. “Thank you, thank you!” he said, and the wallet disappeared. Instead he fished out a piece of paper from his shirt pocket. It was a pamphlet: “Your Real Reward Waits in Heaven.” The image on the cover depicted a thoughtful looking blonde heterosexual couple, their faces turned up towards the sky, the background littered with grey clouds and peppered with white doves. I must have seen hundreds of flyers like this throughout my life, but this one looked especially washed out—the colors were faded, the paper felt worn, even the text looked blurry, as if it had been printed on a machine that was running out of ink.
      I took the paper and for a second pretended to be grateful. I had a smile on my face and Jesus had started to walk away but I couldn’t let Him.
       I was so tired of pretending.
      “I’m gay!” I yelled at his retreating back. “I’m gay!” Jesus looked back at me like I was crazy. For all I knew, he didn’t even know what the word meant. I said it one more time, louder, like maybe that would help him understand. “I’m gay!” Jesus leaped into his massive truck and high-tailed it out of there, taking the correct exit ramp at least. That’s it, I thought. I’m gay. Where is the reward for me?
       For months I’d been wondering where Jesus went, if He was even listening to me anymore, and now I would have to figure out what to do with the possibility that Jesus was too busy traipsing around rest stops off I-40 to give a damn about me.

​Charles Hayes, a Pushcart Prize Nominee, is an American who lives part time in the Philippines and part time in Seattle with his wife. A product of the Appalachian Mountains, his writing has appeared in Ky Story’s Anthology Collection, Wilderness House Literary Review, The Fable Online, Unbroken Journal, CC&D Magazine, Random Sample Review, The Zodiac Review, eFiction Magazine, Saturday Night Reader, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Scarlet Leaf Publishing House, Burning Word Journal, eFiction India, and others.

       
                                        Leaving Appalachia
                                        A  Memoir 
 
 
      Sitting halfway up a wooded hillside, looking down at my shack, and the creek that flows by it, I know that this hollow is more of who I am than the possibilities that come through these hills from the outside. The things that threaten me are mostly rooted in my guts. They will follow wherever I go. But the poverty and isolation are starting to weigh heavy and my best years are gone. If I am to go on I must find a way to leave this place.     
     It can’t deteriorated much more. The little work that I can get is a thing of the past and my drinking is at a level that kills most others. Amazingly my body allows it to continue. Maybe it is the life that I live without the benefit of wheels. The struggle of getting from place to place puts demands upon my body that most people only read about in stories of bygone eras. Maybe this way of life, combined with a strong constitution, stands me up. Thinking that society can have their concrete trails to obesity and heart disease, I try to act like less is more. But most times, especially during bad weather, it is cold comfort. And a bitterness that is not only from the biting cold plays upon my mind. It unsettles the bit of peace that can be had by more space. Yet the anger keeps me going. And it squashes the fear. The thought of sickness has no room to dance.
     I am perceived in this small mountain community as not much. Most don’t find their grapes as sour as I find mine. Romance is dead and few women will tolerate me. Some refuse to condemn but the majority hold me low. This bothers me but, like in the war, I reject the troublesome thoughts with the mantra of Vietnam, “Fuck it, it don’t mean nothing.”
     This little hollow of Fox Run had once belonged to me, like the Hole In The Wall had belonged to the gang. But those days have passed on. And the law is as aware of Fox Run as it was of the Hole In The Wall. My grip on it is slipping.
    
      Fox Run is the only real home that I have ever known. Had it not been for it, I probably would not have made it. Close by my shack are buried all the dogs that I loved and that loved me. To the winds on the ridge, my mother’s ashes are scattered. But the neighbors hate me and the land has changed. It is not as free. My mother will understand, and the dogs that she also loved will stay with her. Deep down in its soul Fox Run will keep it’s integrity and ignore the assholes who climb all over it. And in doing that it will take good care of my loved ones.
 
    The logging trail switches back and forth among the leafy green hardwoods as it ascends to beyond where the waters of Fox Run bubble from the earth. The drone of the locusts have died off and I can smell the coming of colder weather. Near the last switchback a white tailed deer bolts down the steep wooded terrain, the white underside of its tail starched skyward. Excited chatter of squirrels broadcast my intrusion into their territory.
     I will say goodbye to my mother and the Appalachians that have helped me weather the failures of my life. Reaching the summit of the logging trail, I take in the magnificent view and feel like I am losing my last haunt.
     Speaking with my mother and contemplating life away from all that is before me, I try to leave something of relevance before starting back down the mountain. It is a hard thing to do among this landscape of isolation, its back always turned, rooted in the ages.  Not looking back, I start the steep decline. The little that I have to begin another life does not allow me to imagine my return. I will be lucky to just get by wherever I end up. I am 44 years old.
 
                                                                                 ***
 
      The Vietnamese woman setting beside me on the bus is heading to Minneapolis. Her conversation excites me as I learn that she once worked as a nurse for Dr. Tom Dooley in Vietnam. I read Dr. Dooley’s book about his humanitarian and anti-communist work during the late 1950s in Vietnam. That was long before I set foot there but I remember the black slab and the early deaths from that period recorded on it at the memorial in DC. Recalling the pictures in his book, I recognize the woman beside me from her much younger days, smiling happily. Now she seems sad and tired and is not doing well in the Minnesota area. For her, Vietnam was a war zone as well. She helped save lives and I helped Uncle Sam take them. It does not escape me that we both got rewarded with a bunch of shit. For myself I can understand, but it seems tremendously unfair to this women that helped do the same work that Kennedy later based his founding of the Peace Corps upon.
     She has a certain anger that she tries to cover but I can see it. I can also see that, like myself, she doesn’t cotton much to social conversation but, for some reason, is making an exception with me. Probably because I exhibit some respect for her and say that the country of her birth is beautiful. I am flattered that she seems to allow me to get inside her social screen. We never talk about it but I know what has brought her to where she is in life. She was someone loved and respected for her gifts a long time ago. Young and idealistic, she had evaded the communist uprising by coming to America when Dr. Dooley passed on from cancer. But once here, with the doctor gone, she got a good taste of racism, and how it played in her chances of having a life on par with the Americans. Disillusioned and obviously struggling to get back to Minneapolis after a long bus trip to try to better her lot, she is carrying back to Minneapolis another failed attempt to overcome the status quo. Again she has seen an America that the flowery speeches of people like Kennedy didn‘t reveal. Maybe her run from her country to the “freedom” of America haunts her.
     Reaching Minneapolis, I have to change buses. I walk with her into the terminal and notice that no one is there to meet her. Her face is hard but she summons up enough kindness to say goodbye and good luck.
     Gone in the crowd, a lonely woman on the down side of what was a heroic beginning. Guilt is left in her wake for me. I saw some of the things that I did reflected in her eyes as she occasionally looked at me during our exchanges. She saw those same things done by others like me, thought then that they were necessary, but now she knows better. She is hurt.
 
    All across the country the different buses make rest stops at meal times so passengers can buy something to eat and have a smoke. I have peanut butter and crackers, a few sandwiches. I do not buy food. I notice a woman and her little girl that also do not buy anything to eat. Finally, after many hours, they ask me for food. Maybe they are running from something and were in too much of a hurry to plan their provisions. Or maybe they just don’t have the means. I don’t have much to give but I share what I can. The woman eats only a bite and lets her daughter eat the rest. Their appreciation makes me feel privileged to actually encounter and relate to other human beings. I was in the woods a long time and this is different. This bus trip is doing things to me that I didn’t expect. All the buses are long haul so most of the people are leaving something or going to something. Or, like myself, both.
     I cross the Rockies and go across the panhandle of Idaho into Washington State and enter Spokane. I will change buses in Spokane for the last time. It is pushing my third day and by the time I cross Washington to Seattle it will be a full three days.
    
    In the Spokane bus terminal a prostitute is working the crowd. I occupy myself with observing her action. Walking over to my waiting area, she takes a proudly defiant stance and looks the area over, judging the quality of her potential clients. She is young, about 25, dressed in high heels with a strap around each ankle and a short pink skirt that reveals nice legs. Atop her head, over pretty blue eyes, and a well proportioned face, is a pile of red hair. Wearing a thin cashmere sweater with a low neckline that hints of a ripe body below, her only flaw is a small barely noticeable paunch. It is the kind of little tale tell sign on a young person that indicates that they don’t get enough exercise. She catches the eye of a young dark haired man sitting across from me and flashes a smile that shows nice even white teeth. Quickly, as he smiles back, she occupies the seat beside him, fires up a cigarette, and crosses her legs, giving me a view that washes away the travel fatigue. She and her John smoke and talk a while, smiling frequently. About five minutes on they get up and leave together, her close on his arm. Wondering where they go late at night in the city center, I realize just how much I miss a woman’s company.
     In a short while they return and, while the John melts in his seat, the girl’s roving eye picks up mine. She smiles and I catch myself, almost smiling back. She gets this and just turns the pretty smile off. It is gone like it never was, replaced by the roving business eye. It is purely the act of the deal. She takes no offense. She knows people like to watch her because she is good. This is old hat. She has business to take care of while the night is on. And she does. Leaving and returning with young men, her take is brisk. Much like a scene in a movie being shot over again, her night plays on and she does well. As the day breaks and she retires, I climb on my last bus to wind across Washington to Seattle and its Puget Sound.
 
                                                                           ***    
 
   In less than a week I am working in Ballard, a Seattle neighborhood, at a plastics manufacturer running some of the same machines I operated many years before, making and repairing pumps for the mining industry. A Scandinavian working class  neighborhood, Ballard also harbors the Northwest fishing fleet. My boss is a hard ass Norwegian who thinks that the world is full of shit and ignorance except for him. Many times before me, he drove the hired help away.
     Always in my face ranting and raving about something, the little bald headed Norwegian is trying to put me through the wringer as well. I want to smack the shit out of him but I hold on without being demeaned by pretending that his behavior is amusing. It works for a while but when I become interested in an office worker that he, though married, also seems to like, it gets really bad. He is trying to push me into quitting. I know that I will have to go but I am not going to give the son of bitch the satisfaction of driving me away like a cowed dog. I have survived much worse than this ass hole. I will make the son of bitch fire me. When I leave I want to make sure that he can’t say that I quit, thereby saving him from any responsibility in my leaving. The whole shop and probably even his friend, the owner, know his nature. Almost all despise it. I want it to begin to weigh a little more in his life. It is my only way to take something out of this situation. I am biding time.     
    
    Running a very complicated machine that only the Norwegian  completely knows how to run, I have learned it’s operation some and am progressing in my skill with it. Going slow so as not to damage the part and ruin hours of work, I am interrupted when the Norwegian comes running over. Jumping in between me and my work, he yells, “Good God damn Hayes, what is taking you so long!!?    
     My blood boils but I throw my gut switch to calm.
     “Don’t get all hysterical, boss, these things just take a little time.”
     The Norwegian freezes for an instant and squares on me. Red faced and wide eyed, he begins to stutter.
     “Wha...wha...what did you say?”
     Taking a slightly wider stance, I smile and fold my arms.
     “Stop acting like a girl, boss. I’ll get it done. It takes time.”
     The Norwegian stands there a moment, his mouth slightly open, trying to control himself. But the smirk on my face is too much for him, he continues his rant as soon as he can regroup. 
     “You're too slow and don’t deserve this job. Time is money. If you can’t go any faster you better find something else to do. You will not cut it here.”
     He is starting to twitch a little and I know that it is time to walk but I have to get fired first. With a mask of calm and a voice that can not be pegged one way or another, I let it go.
     “Just take it easy before you have an accident. It’ll get done but I’m going as fast as I can and you little tantrums will not move me faster.”
    He starts pacing back and forth, his hands trying to grasp a bald scalp.         
     “Aheeeee I can’t stand it! You're no good! You're too slow! You don’t belong here! You’ll never listen to me……………..get out of here!!!”         
     Tossing my hand rag to the work bench, I walk off.
     I will hear later that he rues this day. Because no one will stay in this job, it is eliminated, leaving him to do the work. My only regret is that I don’t get to see it.
 
    John Haverly, a co-worker at my new job in a group home, is about 10 years younger than me. He is also single, liberal minded, and likes the outdoors. Born and raised in Seattle and up on the Northwest and what it has to offer, John teaches me a lot about the Puget Sound region and its people. And I, in turn, expose him to some of the culture of  Appalachia.
 
       During one of the coldest snaps in Seattle’s history I get kicked out of my living quarters for getting on a drunk. The city is at a standstill because of several feet of snow. Nothing I’m not used to where I come from, but here people are dying…and I am suddenly homeless. John Haverly takes me in and gives me a place to stay until I am able to find a studio apartment on Capitol Hill, just above downtown Seattle.
     Here, for the first time, I see men kissing men. The gay community is everywhere. I have always been liberally inclined but life here on the hill is exposing me to just how liberal things can get. Living in such an environment takes some getting used to, but I manage to work, mind my own business, and stay out of trouble within the anonymity of the city.
 
                                                                              ***
    
      In the spring as I prepare to leave Seattle for back East I start drinking and can’t stop. Taking a large bottle of Vodka, I leave anyway, sticking to the interstates and, except for a few hours of revelry with the locals of some East Oregon town, I drive straight through to Twin Falls, Idaho and crash at the home of a friend I know from my younger years back East.
    
    Moving on a couple of days later after taking a quick, but painful cure, I drive a used diesel VW rabbit.  I have to go under the rabbit sometimes to tighten the fan belt that keeps the battery charged. In Kansas the assembly connector that I have tightened so many times breaks, forcing me into a roadside auto shop to get it wielded. Not taking it kindly when I decline to have the shop reassemble it, the owner frowns and charges me $19 for a half inch wield that would have cost $10 most places. He stuffs the twenty I give him in his pocket and offers no change. Lying in the rain, I put the piece back on the engine and continue on across middle America to the Appalachian foothills. Turning South through Tennessee, I cross the Smoky Mountains into Asheville, North Carolina.
     Checking in to an old time boarding house, I quickly land a job doing the same type of work that I left in Seattle. But it isn’t long before the authority figures that I have tried to dodge in my post war life start rubbing me in ways that smart. As the only male and “un-motherly” employee of the agency I guess it is easy to let me go when I don’t fit the mold. Consequently, I throw it in for North Carolina and hit the road again, heading up the east coast to Delaware.
    
    Grant and Kinesse Livson, my old neighbors from the mountains above me on Fox Run, live with their four daughters and a son on a large tract of land in lower Delaware. Back near the D.C. area where they are originally from, they are a staunch conservative family of evangelical Christians that have built a new life. Back when we first met they had lived in a candle factory by the railroad tracks in Wilcox, the nearest town to Fox Run. Then it was just Kinesse as a single mother of a young daughter and Grant as a roustabout hippie who settled there to drop out and make candles. However it wasn’t long before Grant and Kinesse were out of the candle factory and living on the mountain in a log cabin as crude as the shack that I lived in except that they didn’t even have electricity. But they did have hundreds of very peaceful and quiet mountain top acres. I enjoyed visiting them from time to time when I roamed the mountains.
     Like a blast from the past, I blow in on them and get put up in an old dilapidated camper on the back of their property. No bathroom or even an outhouse but plenty of woods.
     Like hundreds of times before, I quickly, and painfully, dry out and take a job as a laborer laying pipe for a new housing development. Grant is the foreman and the crew are all younger and in better shape than me. Most work atop backhoes and other heavy machinery while I hump with a shovel at their call. The only day that I do not almost collapse, I flag on the highway.
     My last day on the job I clear brush all morning and am on constant demand in the afternoon. It is the only job that I have been on that does not supply water for the laborers. The others carry water on their machines.
     It is a particularly hot and humid day and I get pulled from the brush detail by the young owner of the company who is running a backhoe. He tells me to get at it with a shovel and expects me to keep up with the fine digging behind the rough cut of the backhoe. There is no way, and I know that if I don’t pace myself I will never make it through the day. Seeing me lag behind, the owner jumps from his machine, where he has been sitting all day, and snatches the shovel from my hands while telling me that I am slower than his grandmother. His tone is angry and insulting as if I am lacking because of some moral flaw. It really pisses me off and if I wasn’t  so exhausted I might take it to another level. But that would make it bad for Grant as well so I just curtly reply, “Yeah, but I’m almost as old as your grandmother too.”
     His eyes blaze as we stare at each other. I think he is going to hit me but he just stews for a moment, climbs back on his machine and motors off.
     That evening on the long ride home, Grant tells me that I have to go.
 
    I learn of Point Man Ministries, a Christian based organization  that helps combat veterans in need. Started in 1984 by a Seattle Police Officer who had served in Vietnam, Point Man has chapters spread over the United States. I call the number of the vet currently running it and he quickly sends me a copy of his book and encourages me to seek help from the Point Man Organization when I return to Seattle. The book arrives right before I shove off from Delaware. I read it straight through. His story starts out in a place like Fox Run with a couple of guys who are like me and tells what it is like coming back from Vietnam. Many times during the reading it seems to be a story about me. Not since the movie “Platoon” have I been captured by another’s similar war experiences. Packing the book with the rest of my gear, I feel like I have a place to go.
     With very little money--not enough to get a place to live--and no friends except John Haverly, I thank the Livsons and set off, putting the miles behind me as I again head West. November is winding down and I expect bad weather further West. Plus the glow plugs for my diesel engine are not working properly. After shutting down the engine it will not restart. I need assistance getting started in South Dakota and again in Sundance Wyoming after a snowstorm forces me into town for the night.
     A couple of young locals push me to get the car started and I do not shut the engine down for the rest of the trip. Crossing the continental divide late at night and during another snowstorm, I drive by referencing the reflector posts along the road that stand higher than the snow. Everything else is white and it is the only way to tell where the road is. Dropping down into Washington not long after that and pushing across the arid lands of Eastern Washington, I summit the Cascades. They are also covered by snow but the VW Rabbit’s front wheel drive barely keeps me going. Fishtailing around other cars that are spinning out, I am lucky to get across the Snoqualmie Pass and drop down into the Puget Sound region, back to where I started only months before.
 
     Point Man, over a period of a couple years, gets me rehabilitated enough to keep on keepin on. They also open my eyes to what can happen when one finally makes a stand someplace where people have an idea of who you are. There will be many rough times ahead but here among the worn trails of others like me, the way on is not so ill defined. I manage to get old and remember.