AS I PLEASE XXVII: UNBEARABLE JUDAS EDITION

It's funny how the people you'd take a bullet for are the same ones who pull the trigger on you.

I took a brief hiatus from this blog to handle some personal business, and now that I've returned, I have a lot to say about a lot, so it's time for yet another entry of "As I Please." Let's get into it.

* I have recently undergone a profound personal betrayal. A very close friend of mine, someone I trusted enough to give a key to my home, someone I loved enough to place their photo upon my wall, someone with whom I have exchanged the sort of deep, dark secrets that only trusted pals hand over to each other for safekeeping, decided it would be momentarily expedient to sink a couple of daggers between my shoulder blades. Now, in my life I have gone through a great deal good and bad, but I have surprisingly little experience with betrayal. Sitting here now, I had to think long and hard to the last time someone turned on me so thoroughly and unexpectedly, and to my surprise, I had to go back to elementary school, when my good pal M.C. turned on me violently without any explanation whatsoever. (The betrayals I experienced in Los Angeles were unpleasant but also unsurprising, so they don't really count: see the old cliche about dogs and fleas.) I would say this long streak of "trust rewarded" has just been my good fortune, but the truth is that I have generally been quite selective in who I admit to my inner circle. When you have been subjected to the sort of bullying I experienced when I was in my tweens (a brief but extremely formative period in my life), you adopt a correspondingly low opinion of human nature, and the unexpected upside of this outlook is that you do not lower your guard easily. That tendency, coupled with the years I spent in law enforcement and the writerly necessity of studying human nature down to a granular level, ensured that I have generally chosen my friends and confidants with great care. This time my instincts failed me -- not once, but twice -- and the cost was extremely high. I am revealing this not because I want to complain, and certainly not because I want to name names that would be meaningless to you or go into sordid details you wouldn't be interested in anyway, but because this shabby treachery has yielded an unexpected dividend. Not only have my actual friends rallied around me to a degree I would not have believed possible, culminating, last night, in a kind of impromptu happy hour, I find that I have very little desire to exact revenge upon this person. I am intellectually angry, but emotionally my feelings are limited to disgust. I think I will be content to let the lying, the snitching and the gaslighting I was subjected to, which is now common knowledge, lead to its own independent consequences and take no hand them myself. This feeling represents a fairly enormous leap from my old, vindictive mind-set, and shows all the tedious lectures I've given in this blog ("life lessons") have not just been blather and bullshit. Yep, I actually try and practice what I preach, and sometimes I even succeed (!). In this particular case the person involved has exposed themselves as a rat not merely to me, but to almost everyone she works with, and my spies tell me she is painfully well aware of it. But whether she feels remorse, or self-pity, or even that weird form of anger that guilty parties usually direct at their victims after screwing them over, makes no difference to me now. This was addition by subtraction -- painful subtraction to be sure, but in the end, still a positive. No group of apostles benefits from a Judas, and in the long run I truly believe that Sherlock Holmes was correct when he said "her offenses carry their own punishments." Sometimes in life it's necessary to right those who have wronged you, if the wrong be egregious enough: other times, as Sun Tsu once noted, all you have to do is wait by the river long enough, and their bodies will go floating by.

* About twelve years ago, I made a point of turning off social media six months before any large-scale political election. In those days this was a very effective means of shutting out the hateful noise I saw spewing from friends of mine who were otherwise rational human beings regardless of their affiliations. Unfortunately it is no longer 2012, and this sort of self-imposed incommicado is no longer really possible. Notwithstanding social media, I cannot turn on the radio in my kitchen, or in my car, or use any music app which runs commercials, or jump on YouTube, or drive anywhere, or even use my phone, without being bombarded into a kind of shell-shocked dismay by political attack ads of the ugliest possible type, by automated polls, by robo-calls, by unwanted text messages, by endless yard signs, all concerning either the upcoming gubernatorial or presidential elections. I would like to believe this nonsense is merely a by-product of our deeply corrupt and ugly electoral system, which runs on money and nothing but money, and always plays to the worst instincts in voters, but I am tempted to wonder if it isn't all part of a truly sinister master plan, one designed to fill the perspective voter with so much disgust at the entire sordid process that they simply refuse to vote at all. If this is not actually the case, it is certainly the actual effect even if there is no controlling intelligence behind the squalor. I have never met anyone of any political stripe, no matter how extreme, who didn't regard the American election season as tedious, ugly and unbearable, and it seems to be worse now than it has ever been. The radio ads I heard just moments ago when cooking in my kitchen exult in exploiting the rape of a five year old child in hopes of provoking the sort of anger, fear, and bigotry which have characterized our political process for way too many years now. We desperately need the most severe possible election reforms in this country, and as with most of what we desperately need from a political perspective, we are 100% not going to get it. This is the face of modern democracy.

* I spent last weekend in a cabin in the woods up on the Pennsylvania - New York border. I drank beer, chopped wood, swam in very cold water, sat by an ever-blazing firepit, ate steak and eggs, shot guns at targets which were largely safe from my bullets, and did a lot of talking with two old friends, neither of whom I see very often. I cannot tell you what good this did my soul after the backstabbing I so recently endured, but what really struck me about the experience was how natural it felt. I live downtown, in a small city, I haven't fired a gun in 20 years, and haven't handled an axe in probably close to 25 or more, and while I won't say I did these things particularly well, the actions themselves felt almost entirely comfortable. I was reminded of some horseback riding I did a long time ago. I had never ridden a horse in my life, and yet when I took my fractious mount, named Satan (believe it or not, that was the horse's name, and a very apt handle it was) to a full gallop, I felt as cool as a cucumber despite a loose saddle and a lack of health insurance. I don't believe this was courge, rather ancestral memory. It just goes to show you that you can take the man out of nature, you can separate him from his tools, you can soften him with air conditioning and other comforts, but you can't entirely eliminate the pleasure he feels at connecting with the Y in his chromosomes.

* Today I received a check from the book signing I held on September 7. I had quite forgotten that the venue that was kind enough to host this effort had sold a quantity of my books at the counter prior to the event itself, and only charged me the 4% credit card fee off each transaction. In this day and age of electronic transfers, where money is reduced to an idea rather than something tangible, it was immensely satisfying to see the sum, small in relative terms but not negligible by any means, printed on that pale blue-gray paper. I will, of course, deposit the check electronically, but I may frame it just to remind me that writing, while not yet my sole source of income by a longshot, is not just my hobby, either.

* In addition to unbearable political ads, I have been reminded recently, in ways both personal-petty and not, that bureaucracy, while certainly necessary to maintain this clanking vehicle we call civilization, is also infuriating and has probably killed more people than bullets and bombs together. On the petty personal level, I have had to take my car in to two different garages a half-dozen times to get it past emissions, not due to any catastrophic shortcoming but rather a loose hose in the engine which was causing the warning lights to flare unnecessarily; that and a spot of rust on the exhaust so small you couldn't have slipped a dime through it. I have also had to wait for a new driver's license for something like 45 - 60 days, forcing to me drive with the expired one until, after God knows how much time and effort, I finally got the new one in hand (the picture is, admittedly, very good for a change). This doesn't matter in the scheme of things, of course; it's just exasperating and reminds one that the government is like a set of huge wheels that rolls with impercepitble slowness but immense weight. Which brings me to the story of NFKRZ, one of my favorite YouTubers. NFKRZ, a.k.a. Roman, is a Russian expat who fled his native land rather than get sucked into Putin's war in Ukraine, and for the last two years I have watched him deteriorate spiritually and mentally as he has battled his way through nests of red tape in one European country after another. I understand that in wartime, moreso than in what we laughably refer to as peacetime, refugees are a problem for which there is often no easy solution; but these "problems" are also human beings whose suffering is terribly real. Roman seems like a good man; he is certainly funny enough, and detests racism, nationalism, ethnic prejudice, war, and all the rest of it, which means he has no place in Putin's half-fascist, half-Mafia state. But he also seems to have no place anywhere in Europe, and thanks to the robot bureaucracy of YouTube itself, he is being demonitized thanks to his stateless condition and may soon run out of money as well as visa. It's easy for us to speak so generally about "illegal immigrants" and "refugees" as if they were weather conditions or species of insects, and hard to keep in mind that but for the grace of whatever god you may pray to, they could be us -- just ordinary people trapped in extraordinary circumstances, trying to be seen as people and not digits.

* CAGE LIFE, my first novel, which I released in 2016, was recently named a Readers Favorite bronze medal winner, an accolade which lands atop its previous laurels of Zealot Script "Book of the Year" and Best Indie Book Award Winner for Mystery / Suspense, among others. I do confess disappointment that it wasn't a silver or a gold, and that its stablemate, KNUCKLE DOWN, did not win or place in the contest (both were rated Readers Favorite 5 Stars), but it's nice to know that my first horse still has some legs despite being so long out of the gate.

* I had plans to go see a baseball game tonight, but it is once again raining. Though I was able to get to three or four games this season, that number would have doubled if not for the fact that every goddamn time I want to go to a game, it fucking well rains on me. This is not just perception. If you were bored enough to compare the schedule of York Revolution "home" games with the days it has rained during this minor league baseball season, you'd find the numbers correspond about 1:1. Indeed, one of the games I did attend was rained out 3/4 of the way through, and another aborted before the first inning after we all sat in the damp stands for an hour and a half, drinking vastly overpriced beer and eating vastly oversalted popcorn. I mention this because someone told me yesterday (it was raining again then, too) that "we need this rain because it's been such a dry summer" and I refrained from killing him, which also shows vast personal growth on my part (I kid because I love).

And that about wraps up this much-overdue entry on a drizzly Friday I spent getting my car inspected for the fifth time. At least it was successful this go-round. In the coming days and weeks I will be posting a review of Carly Rheilan's disturbing novel A CAT'S CRADLE, writing another entry in "Memory Lane" and seeing to two moldy old promises I made here -- the first, to continue my examination of Frank Herbert's DUNE series (the books and the films), and the second, to take a deep dive into one of the best-written television series of all time, Chris Haddock's DA VINCI'S INQUEST.