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When I was a kid, my big brother Nick, who I’ve missed every single day since we lost him suddenly in 2020, wore a gold chain with an Italian horn charm and told everybody he was Italian.

Nick was not Italian.

At all.

He wasn’t a little Italian. He wasn’t Italian-adjacent. He wasn’t Italian sprinkled, Italian infused or produced in a facility that also processed Italians. As far as I know, he had never even rubbed up against an Italian hard enough to leave trace amounts of DNA on him, although this was my big brother Nick, so honestly, anything was possible.

He was half Lebanese and half Irish.

That’s it.

To be fair to Nick, he could pull it off. He had these big, thick, bushy eyebrows, a full shock of black hair and a face that could absolutely pass for Italian, because it turns out when you mix Celtic with Arabic, every once in a while the genetic slot machine spits out a guy who looks like he has cousins in Bensonhurst.

But Nick WANTED to be Italian because Italian was fucking cool. Rocky Balboa was Italian. Tony Manero was Italian. The Italian guys had the gold chains, the Cadillacs, the hair, the unbuttoned shirts and the whole fucking operation.

This was the early eighties, when a Members Only jacket zipped to exactly the right altitude and enough Drakkar Noir to violate local air-quality standards could make a teenage boy feel like he had important business at Satriale’s, and no matter how many times Nick practiced that De Niro stare in the mirror, our family tree remained stubbornly, inconveniently Lebanese and Irish.

So Nick did what any determined adolescent would do when confronted with the immovable obstacle of his own DNA.

He ignored the fuck out of it.

And because I was a kid and he was my big brother, I genuinely wondered whether there was some secret Italian annex to the family tree nobody had bothered to explain to me. Nick was older. Nick knew shit. Nick could drive. Maybe there was a branch from Naples wedged between Beirut and County Cork.

There wasn’t.

Nick was just full of shit.

And God, I miss him.

But Nick accidentally taught me something extremely useful all those years ago.

You can say something over and over and over again. You can dress it up. Accessorize it. Embroider it on a fucking pillow. Have it notarized, laminated and announced by a marching band.

It still doesn’t make it fucking true.

I’ve been dyeing my naturally brunette hair since I was eighteen years old. I can buy every bottle of blonde hair dye at CVS, bleach myself until I’m visible from the fucking International Space Station and demand everybody call me Goldilocks.

Upgrade to paid

I am still not a natural fucking blonde.

Elizabeth Taylor could have walked down the aisle at her eighth wedding in a white dress, carrying lilies and wearing a veil long enough to cover Rhode Island.

It would not have made her a fucking virgin.

Joe the Plumber can slap a sign on the side of his van tomorrow morning that says COLONOSCOPIES $99, put on a white coat, snap on a pair of latex gloves and start introducing himself as Dr. Joe, Board-Certified Ass Specialist.

He is still a fucking plumber, and for the love of God, keep your pants on.

Because wanting something to be true doesn’t make it true.

Calling something by a different name doesn’t make it become whatever the fuck you decided to call it.

And having the president of the United States throw a tantrum and scrawl a new fucking name across an international body of water that was called Lake Ontario before this country even existed does not make it Lake America.

It makes him an asshole with a Sharpie.

But, inexplicably, cartoonishly, beyond fucking parody, here we are, because grievance-glutted, geography-groping, gold-plated gooch stain Donald Trump has decided that being pissed at our closest ally now requires dragging one of the Great Lakes into his latest small-dicked little power trip and ordering the federal government to participate in his hissy fit.

Lake Ontario has managed to exist in my life with remarkable fucking unobtrusiveness. I cannot remember the last time before this week I said its name out loud.

Daily? No.

Weekly? Fuck no.

Monthly? Please.

Yearly? I honestly don’t know.

It’s been sitting up there minding its wet Canadian-American business while I have gone about mine, and we were doing just fine.

Now it has been unwillingly conscripted into the geopolitical equivalent of a jilted ex-girlfriend entering hour seventy-two of a breakup, mascara dried into black skid marks beneath her eyes, one acrylic nail gone, hair glued to the strawberry lip gloss on her cheek, a Virginia Slim drooping from the corner of her mouth, his old T-shirt hanging to her knees, no pants, room-temperature pink screw-top wine wedged between her thighs, surrounded by shredded Walgreens photos, a cracked iPhone, his toothbrush snapped in half, one hoop earring she can’t find the mate to and a damp Kleenex adhered to her calf while she changes his contact name to LYING SMALL-IN-THE-PANTS FUCKFACE IMPOTENT CUNT, blocks him, unblocks him, deletes his number, retrieves it from Recently Deleted and checks every eleventy minutes to see whether he has somehow had a change of heart and wants her back.

He has not.

He’s ghosted her completely and at this point is probably accordion-folded into the back of a fucking Citroën the size of a toaster in the middle of a full-blown NATO gangbang with Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz and Pedro Sánchez while she’s still on the bedroom floor with one tit hanging out of his old T-shirt, refreshing Find My Friends and firing off a succession of slurry voice memos.

FINE. I CUT YOUR FACE OUT OF THE NIAGARA FALLS PICTURES.

I RENAMED THE LAKE WE SHARED.

I WANT MY VCR BACK.

I NEVER EVEN LIKED YOUR MOTHER.

I’M DOING AMAZING.

CALL ME.

This is what currently passes for “diplomacy,” except our rancid little breakup banshee has nuclear codes.

And can you fucking imagine traveling back to 1996 and telling Republicans that within thirty years they’d be red-faced, vein-throbbing, foam-flecked and bellowing CRY HARDER, LIBTARDS because the reality-TV game-show host they put in the Oval Office TWICE had managed to find more warmth for North Korea than Canada and was punishing our closest northern ally by rage-renaming Lake fucking Ontario?

Bob Dole would’ve stared at you like you’d shit in his briefcase.

Pat Buchanan would’ve assumed the Soviets had won.

Rush Limbaugh would’ve checked the label on his painkillers to make sure he hadn’t swallowed the whole bottle before breakfast (again).

And somehow the stupid keeps finding new basement levels.

Because Lake America sounds less like one of the world’s great freshwater bodies than something conceived during a methamphetamine brainstorm behind a shuttered Kmart by the washed-up kid who played “Boy #2” on a 1984 sitcom and now owns three storage units full of stolen copper wire.

It sounds like somebody bought every slide, tube and medieval spinal-injury apparatus Action Park was legally required to dismantle, reassembled the whole tetanus trap somewhere in the Oklahoma Panhandle and started charging five dollars admission, cash only, waiver mandatory.

It sounds like a Foghat cover band playing the Thursday-night grand opening of a daiquiri barn/transmission shop in Slidell, Louisiana, while a guy named Duane sells loose Marlboros beside the Porta-Potty.

It sounds like an educational initiative launched in conjunction with Be Best.

Lake America.

Upgrade to paid

Jesus fucking Christ.

It sounds like something your insurance refuses to cover.

And the red-white-and-bald-eagle ethnonationalist genius caucus polishing its collective knob over the supposedly pristine Americanness of America might enjoy learning that Amerigo Vespucci was Italian, and the German cartographer who put “America” on his 1507 map was working in what is now France.

So this whole freedom-fapping patriotic bukkake is being performed by a flotilla of forehead-forward, cortex-deficient, cerebrally undercapitalized, chromosome-challenged, patriotism-pickled fuckwits defending a European christening honoring an Italian while acting like Canada just took a dump on Betsy Ross.

Fucking magnificent.

Meanwhile, the Epstein files still haven’t been released in full, and Trump’s name is all over material that has come out. People are getting financially flayed at grocery stores and gas pumps. Food is being recalled. Measles is spreading. Critical weapons reserves have been chewed down frighteningly low. And we are six months into an illegal, unconstitutional motherfucking endless war in Iran.

Those are the fucking stakes.

Not some ancient shared expanse of freshwater most of us hadn’t thought about since Christ knows when.

And no, I am not giving Donald Trump credit for some diabolical master plan. He is not Machiavelli. He is impulse in an adult diaper. Appetite without brakes. Ego without a governor. A peckish, perpetually pissed-off emotional hemophiliac with the self-command of a cocaine-addled retainer salesman at a three-day dental convention in Reno.

This isn’t genius.

It’s muscle memory.

Trump has spent his entire public existence marinating in spectacle: tabloids, feuds, bullshit boasts, fake grandeur, ratings, cameras, conflict, attention at any fucking cost. When the audience starts looking elsewhere, make some fresh preposterous declaration and drag every eyeball back toward him.

And somehow the jingoistic, jizz-brained, flag-fondling freedom fetishists are acting like this is OWNING THE LIBS instead of what it actually is: a loud little paperwork stunt the rest of the planet is free to ignore.

That is the whole fucking achievement.

He ordered his own government to play along while Canada keeps calling it Lake Ontario and Trump stomps around on this side of the border like a sunburned, snack-deprived, sippy-cup-slinging toddler who just found out the other kid gets to keep the blue shovel.

He can issue orders.

He can change federal maps.

He can tell every bootlicking, bobbleheaded, brain-dead beneficiary of his bullshit to call it whatever he wants.

Ottawa is not losing sleep.

Nobody is trembling.

Nobody in Paris is clutching their pearls because Donald J. Trump conquered a Microsoft Word document.

And there is something he will never understand because everything inside him is built around possession, permanence and putting his mark on whatever surface happens to be nearest.

You can build a fucking arch. It doesn’t make you Caesar.

You can tear down the East Wing. It doesn’t make the White House yours.

You can slap your name onto the Kennedy Center. It doesn’t make Kennedy disappear.

You can stand beneath a chandelier, shellac yourself in gold and announce a resplendent new epoch of unsurpassed national glory with all the bombast of a bankrupt casino owner unveiling a marble bidet.

It still doesn’t make this a fucking golden age.

We still know what we’re looking at.

And when you’re gone, and that day will be here sooner rather than later, every cheap little territorial scar you carved into this country will be scrubbed, scoured, chiseled, sandblasted and power-washed the fuck off.

The signs will come down.

The plaques will be replaced.

The maps will be corrected.

The names will be restored.

And aside from whatever antibiotic-resistant STD they eventually name after your sorry ass, you will be forgotten.

So enjoy the attention while it lasts, you bloated, blustering, bargain-bin Bonaparte, you spray-tanned shitheel, you grandiose gargoyle, you pustular prince of performative patriotism presiding over another irrelevant little atlas aneurysm.

Because the world is not watching in awe.

It is watching you make an ass of yourself in increasingly larger font.

What the fuck else is new?

And to our friends in Canada: elbows up.

A plurality of the dumbest dumbfucks who ever dumbed inflicted this fucking reality on all of us.

But we will get through it… together. 🇨🇦

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Person holds an american flag, smiling and happy

For the love of God and all that’s good and beautiful, haven’t you had enough, America?

Enough book bans,
culture wars,
bathroom bills,
family separations,
poisoned food,
renamed lakes,
unrelenting surveillance,
tax-funded genocides,
and wars of choice,

Haven’t you had enough of terrorized refugees,
billionaire techbros,
hospital room ICE raids,
protected predators,
ignored lynchings,
kleptocratic malpractice,
legislated religion,
and of being helmed by a lecherous, drug-addled, vile, barely literate serial predator and career criminal?

Haven’t you had enough of brutal assaults on the rights of women,
on immigrants,
on transgender teens,
on unarmed black men,
on affordable healthcare,
on free speech,
on our Military?

Have you had enough of relentless attacks on the poor,
on the disabled,
on the environment,
on peaceful protestors,
on the electoral process,
on the US Postal Service,
on objective truth,
on diversity as an idea?

Haven’t you had enough nonsensical conspiracies,
denials of Science,
mockery of expertise,
ignored climate change,
silencing of doctors,
stoked racism,
polluted courts?

Haven’t you had enough cruelty,
enough bigotry,
enough criminality,
enough divisiveness,
enough malevolence,
enough hatred,
enough ugliness?

Haven’t you had enough needless suffering,
enough unnecessary death,
enough Constitutional crises,
enough curated conflict,
enough manufactured emergencies,
enough presidential tweet tantrums,
enough intentional chaos?

Maybe it’s just me.

Maybe you’re fine with it all; maybe this is good enough for you; maybe you’ve resigned yourself to this dystopian white nationalist fever dream as inevitable. I sure as hell haven’t.

I’ve had enough of this frenetic circus of sociopathy over the past ten years to last a thousand lifetimes. I’m sick to my stomach of the nation we are, and I’m in-the-marrow-of-my-bones tired of being embarrassed of and grieving over the place I call home.

I want something better.

I want equity pursued.
I want bigotry shouted down.
I want justice escorted in.
I want compassion to trend.
I want kindness to go viral.
I want diversity to be celebrated.
I want the poor, tired, huddled masses to breathe again here.
I want ceremonial American “greatness” to give way to actual common goodness.
I want to stop being at the mercy of sadistic, hateful human beings who have contempt for everything and everyone.

What the hell do you want for this place, and are you willing to do whatever is necessary to get it?

November is coming, and there’s no way to overstate the reality that this is the last stand for all of it, for all of us. What we do over the coming weeks will initiate our rebirth or write our epitaph as a Republic.

You and I have this moment to end what we’ve had enough of and to usher in what we want to see more of; to demand what we cannot live without and to condemn what we will not abide.
We have this moment to create a home for ourselves and our children, and for other people’s children, for everyone who lives here and for all those who dream of living here.
We have this moment to leave something for the vast multitude on the horizon of history who will inherit this place; this moment, between the America that is and the America that could be—and for better or for worse, will be.

And it is all in our hands.

Regardless of their gerrymandering and suppression and intimidation and lawlessness, We The Pissed-Off People can wield our numbers to defy and defeat them. 

We simply have to decide to put aside our purity tests and our excuses and our infighting and our minor differences and our apathy, and do the damn work together instead of bickering, complaining, and distracting ourselves into fascism.

No politician is likely to move people who are still inexplicably undecided; those still stuck in laziness, hopelessness, or ignorance; those who still aren’t planning to use their voices.

Only you can do that.

Only you can reach people in the trenches of your relationships with them: in your home and your neighborhood and at your school and at work and on your timelines. You can be the difference in the day.

What have you had enough of over the last ten exhausting, disorienting, heartbreaking years?
What do you want to leave for those who will follow us?
What will you do in the coming days in response?

America is not in the hands of a politician or a preacher or an athlete or a celebrity; it’s in our hands. Yes, it’s true, no one is coming to save us. The only question left is, will we save ourselves?

In the weeks ahead, may you leverage your voice, your time, your resources, your circle of influence, your network, and your community, and may you do all you can to transform the America that is into the America that could be.

This will be the dawn or the death of the nation we dream of making.

In November, may we wake up in that hopeful, beautiful, glorious place of possibility again.

I have had enough of this divided, corrosive, violent, failing America.

Have you?

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I Will Never Forgive Him (Just Kidding)

My grandfather sold his beloved ’55 Thunderbird a few months before I started driving—ostensibly because he was having too much trouble getting in and out of the car (he was 72 at the time). I’d wanted to be able to drive it since I was small enough to lay out on the parcel shelf between the seats and rear window.

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Suburbia, 1973

Lit up like the Poltergeist House

That caption isn’t too far off the mark. We swear—even though it was brand new construction on a former onion field and we were the first owners—the place was haunted.

We’d all be downstairs in the family room (or me in my bedroom which was also on the same level) and doors would slam up in the bedrooms upstairs, even though there were no windows openand noting else to cause a breeze.

Once, on the verge of sleep, I found walking up the stairs that went from the lower level to the ground floor. I looked over my shoulder and saw myself asleep in bed. I turned around and was greeted by what I can only call a shadow figure (gives me chills now jsut remembering it). I knew he wanted into my body. He lunged at me. We wrestled, tumbling down the stairs. I got up the literally dove back into my sleeping body.

After I’d gone off to college, Mom took to sleeping in my bed downstairs because Dad’s snoring had gotten too insufferable. That was, until one night when she was violently shaken out of the bed. “Never again,” was all she said of the incident.

I mean look at all those smiling faces. What kind of entity would bear that family any ill will? (Taken at the grandparents’ place in Sun City later that year (probably Thanksgiving or Christmas).

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50 Years Ago

Navajo Hall dorm room. One month after starting at the University of Arizona.

Oh the places you’ll go. The things you’ll see. The men you’ll love…all of which will ultimately transform you into who you are now.

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In Honor Of Dolly

This record is among the half dozen or so pieces of vinyl in my collection at the time that survived “the great purge” in the late 80s. I never thought it was a particularly good record, but it still held some sentimental value that caused me to keep it back then and even today I remember the afternoon I bought it—and where.

It was sometime in the fall of 1978. As is typical with Phoenix that time of year, it was balmy. The extreme heat was gone for the season but it hadn’t yet turned cold. I’d gone to Odyssey Records on the southeast corner of Camelback and 12th Street in search of something else, but this record was prominently displayed in the store’s 12-inch singles section. Naturally I’d heard it in the clubs by this point, but it hadn’t grabbed me enough to actually rush out and get a copy. It seemed that Dolly—like Rod Stewart—had been pushed in the disco direction unwittingly and it showed.

But then I saw it…the pink vinyl peeking out of the center hole of the sleeve.

I had to get it if only for that one aspect. Finding colored vinyl in the wild back in the day was a pretty rare occurrence. Would I have gotten if it were standard black vinyl?

In all honesty, probably not. This was years before 9 to 5 or Best Little Whorehouse in Texas or Fried Green Tomatoes. Naturally I knew who she was and I was familiar with many of her songs, but Dolly really hadn’t made an impact on my consciousness yet. Of course, all that changed over the next 40 years and while I considered Baby I’m Burnin’ more of a novelty than anything else at the time, it’s become one of my most treasured records.

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