TomFlannery.com

It’s all a bit surreal out there. News of a massive, unprecedented Russian cyber attack has dropped….like snow landing on warm ground. Nobody is quite sure what it all means, or what damage may already be done, and most don’t really seem to give a shit. It’s been likened to Russian fighter planes trolling US air space, but our President hasn’t mentioned it at all. He hasn’t mentioned a lot of things lately, but one might expect this would focus him long enough to compose a tweet at least. Apparently he’s too busy chaining himself to the bed, daring the deep state, which now includes Mitch McConnell, Geraldo Rivera, and the Supreme Court, to remove him. We live in strange times, Bubba. I can’t wait to read all the books.

A Covid relief package may or may not hit before the end of the year….and it may or may not include stimulus checks…….laughingly small but they might buy two week’s rent and a case of beer. Washington remains stunningly out of touch with the struggles of average Americans, who are drowning in a system that hasn’t “trickled-down” since that stupid fucking term was invented. People ordered not to work are given nothing. Covid numbers rage out of control. Three thousand plus are dying every day, while the Wal-Marts and shopping malls are filled to the brim, 50% occupancy and social distancing be damned. But at least you can’t grab a beer at Joe’s Corner Bar, so there’s that. We just got walloped by a historic blizzard, because of course we did. There is talk of another government shutdown (although I’m not sure how we’d be able to tell). There’s a vaccine, but no solid time-line on when it will be available to all. Considering how bad our government fucked up covid testing, it’s hard to believe distribution of a life saving vaccine isn’t gonna turn into a massive bureaucratic shitshow. Disinformation from anti-vaxxers is already rampant, and the usual stupids are gobbling it up like oxy from a pill mill. This vaccine will give the Klan a chance to pivot away from getting all jizzy about not wearing masks and instead turn them all into Jenny McCarthy. I can’t wait.

Christmas is a week away. How is this possible? Since March time has ebbed and flowed……we’d forget what day it is, sleep cycles were decimated……it suddenly seemed dark 20 hours a day. If lucky enough to work remotely, we’d log on early, or late, or somewhere in between, somehow covering portions of all 3 shifts at the same time. Wide awake at 3am, standing on the porch watching the stars and listening to the silence. Staying up all night. Or sleeping all day. Staying connected somehow…..Facetime or Zoom or just a social media post saying “is there anybody out there?” Music and Netflix and Middleswarth BBQ with lager chasers and trying to tamp down the paranoia when you started coughing or feeling something else vaguely Covid-y. Friday didn’t feel like Friday anymore. The weekend didn’t feel like the weekend. Even Monday got lost in a depressive cycle. It’s been a week of Monday’s since March. I guess this is all what a wardrobe of hoodies and pajama pants does to the mind. Merry Christmas!

Because 2020 has sucked so hard, you’d have to be a monster to think that 2021 isn’t going to bring some improvement. So we’ll virtually gather on New Year’s Eve and suffer through Ryan Seacrest and horrible lip syncing and watch the ball drop and expect that this is the start of a less shitty world because we’re adorably optimistic, especially when we’re drunk as monkeys.

And then we’ll awake to 3000+ more dead, and more crowded stores and more lies and more disinformation and the dumb people will still be dumb and the scientists will still be ignored and Trump will still be mad-tweeting while tied to the bed and this will go on and on until the economy collapses in a cacophony of one final greed-induced screech by savage un-empathetic rich white men. Or, you know, maybe things really will get better with the vaccine in place. I mean, anything is possible. But I’m an irish catholic, so I always expect and plan for the worst because it saves tons of time.

But I’ve been wrong before so…..

Stay safe out there my friends. What I want more than anything else is to gather and hug and raise glasses with you all. Many glasses. Many hugs.

In a bit..

–tf

There’s a storm a-comin’.

I think anyway. It’s been all over the news that we’re about to be pulverized by the Winter Warlock, anywhere from 4 inches to 24 inches (depending on who you ask and how prone to exaggeration your Facebook friends are), which seems like a lot of wiggle room for the weather peeps but whatever. To prepare I made sure that our snow blower is still broken (it is), and dug out some old shovels from the basement. I fully intend to wage relentless war against this thing by shoveling and re-shoveling every hour if need be, through the night if I have to (I’ll sleep when I’m dead, and my driveway is cleared off), anything to prevent that insane knee-high morning-after mess that awaits those not as OCD as I am. My kids will laugh at me the entire time, but it will all be worth it. I think.

That’s the kind of snow that’s so heavy that it feels like you’re in the Mount Everest Death Zone moving it. A few feet then you have to stop and gulp for air and watch all the plow trucks go past your house building that ice wall at the end of your driveway ever higher. It doesn’t matter how many times I clear the driveway….as I’m convinced there’s a drone somewhere pin-pointing my location for the trucks to immediately plow me back in again. And when they plow the driveway in, they completely bury the mail box, so that needs to be re-opened as well. The mail folks…..I’m sure this is just what they need at this point in their turned-upside-down-7-days-a-week-16-hour-a-day lives…..a route full of buried mailboxes with their trucks filled with a 100% increase in Amazon Prime packages.

There will also be 2 cars in said driveway….so I’ll have to be relentless in clearing them off….then moving them from side to side, and then back again. It’s all planned in my head, like a military operation. My plan will go awry of course….within minutes…..and depending on how long my paper-mache back holds out.

You have to choose the proper clothes. Pajama pants work well with boots (I’m assuming you’ve been wearing them exclusively since March anyway….so a no-brainer). They are quick to dry off once you’ve completed your round. A hoodie with a scarf for the face (and aren’t we all used to this already anyway?) and a good ski jacket. A good skull cap is a must…..gotta keep the head warm, especially if the wind is howling, which is what they’re calling for. If you’ve got a fire place, fire it up. You can dump your gear in front of it to dry between outings. After the initial cleaning, you should plan on 15 minutes on, and 45 minutes off. Until the snow stops. You can doze on the couch but always have your phone alarm set.

(Remember, there’s nothing normal about any of this. This is strictly OCD behavior talking, so if that’s not your thing feel free to move along.)

Of course, the last time they called for “flurries” we got dumped on, so now that they’re calling for us to get dumped on it’s possible this is all just an elaborate ruse, but they seem deadly earnest this time, and have seen fit to share all sorts of official looking graphics showing the path of the storm and the snow totals, using pretty colors and interactive maps. It’s national news…..so there has to be shoveling or they will be buried in an avalanche of social media ridicule.

I don’t know if there is any such thing as a “snow day” anymore. It seems pretty quaint in 2020, as we all sit in front of Zoom screens in our pajama pants and lose track of what day it is. A pity that kids may not be let loose to lay their burdens down for a bit and roll on the white stuff…..then inside for some hot chocolate topped with marshmallows, and then back out again, in a loop until the darkness falls and the red-cheeks are returned to normal by the cool side of the pillow. As kids we used to look forward to winter storms….and now it just seems like Mother Nature made it to the front of the line and has her chance to drill us with another unwanted 2020 face tattoo.

But she ain’t gonna win. I’m gonna be down to the pavement by Thursday morning. Who’s with me?

In a bit…

–tf

Depression is a real thing. I can’t define it but I know it when it arrives. And sometimes it gets its hooks into you and does strange things. It fires all the wrong synapses and all you’re left with is the feeling that you’ve fallen and you’re not so sure you want to get up. Sleep is more of a refuge than a comfort, but no matter how many hours you pour on…it never seems to touch the tired spot. The seasonal blues is normal enough, but in the midst of a crippling pandemic, it’s like it’s been given a dose of steroids. It gets dark so early, and you can find yourself actually looking forward to the sun going down. It’s less competition. It levels the playing field.

We’re not built for all this…..this enforced isolation. The only thing still on the same schedule are the bills that arrive, pandemic be damned. All the worry. What if this? What if that? What if I lose this? How am I going to pay that? There’s no help. There’s no cavalry. There’s no safety net. There’s no leadership. It’s the privilege we were born into, and then just blind luck. Some will make it. Some won’t. Burdens shared are burdens lighted. But we can’t share. It’s reckless to share. We need to hold. And be held. And that’s not allowed. We know what we need to do but half won’t do it. We know what we want, but can’t get there until everybody pulls in the same direction.

Imagine living along the coast during World War II and being asked to turn off your house lights at night so that lights on shore would not help the German U-boats find their way in the darkness, and saying “Fuck you, I’m keeping my lights on because my rights…..”.

That’s where we are.

Until this monstrously selfish behavior ends …..it’s a 9/11 every day. And soon it will be an Antietam every day. It’s appalling and sad.

There’s always somebody worse off than you. If you have food and shelter, and the bank isn’t threatening you, you’re near the front of the line. If you’ve remained untouched by this virus, you are fortunate. The numbers are terrifying, and there doesn’t seem to be any plan to get them under control. Since March, the selfish gene has gone viral. No amount of crippled ICUs or dead bodies can dent the mask-less heads of those who can only feel the lash on their own backs. If anything, the worse it gets, the less empathy we see. We only seem to double down on cruelty. Yesterday the Governor of PA announced he tested positive for COVID-19, and within 15 minutes I was reading posts from “Friends” wishing him a speedy death. This is not the same country in which I was born. It’s out of this poison soil that depression grows, and spreads. It’s watered by ignorance.

We all have ways of trying to cope. Reading or writing or exercising or eating and drinking or staring at Netflix like a stoned Elvis (hopefully unarmed for the TV’s sake). For those lucky enough to be working…..it’s wake up in the dark and come home in the dark, dodging freak snowstorms and black ice. Trips to the grocery store and booze runs with just enough on the debit card to get you in and out. Watch over the kids like paranoid lunatics, maybe bring a Spotify playlist for a ride through your childhood, remembering distant memories and recalling other names. Leaving the house and then coming right back because we forgot our masks. Some things will never be normal.

Everybody says they understand. But they don’t. Everybody says “I’m here if you want to talk” but what are you gonna say? You can’t talk about depression without sounding whiny, which is why nobody talks about it. So you wait it out. And you hope for a better tomorrow. But these days? It’s hard to hope for that when you don’t know if it’s Wednesday or Thursday.

I don’t remember what “normal” felt like, so if we do get back to it I’m sure I won’t notice.

It looks like another shutdown is coming. The screeching will commence….but for the most part it’s the screechers who have got us here, by thinking of nobody but themselves. The longer they fight this, the longer and darker this winter is going to be. It should be over now. Like it is in most nations on earth. Americans seem perversely willing to walk across dead bodies to preserve their right not to sacrifice to keep the pile from growing.

I don’t know what comes next. I’m tired. And I’ve been lucky. Extraordinarily lucky. And still, it gets hold of me. And won’t let go. It’s all too real.

I feel for everybody. Please take care of yourselves so we can soon get back to taking care of each other.

In a bit..

–tf

I was 14 years old when we lost John Lennon. It was a senseless act of violence…….perpetrated by a nobody. I’ve tried to forget the killer’s name. Some religious zealot with a broken brain and a hard-on for JD Salinger.

Howard Cosell told me, and told the world. In the middle of the Monday Night Football broadcast. It didn’t seem real. It still doesn’t seem real. I don’t remember if I cried or not. I was alone upstairs, watching the game on my parent’s color TV in their bedroom. They placed it on top of a tall dresser, so I would watch it standing up to get the best view. All I can recall is being sort of frozen in place. I must have yelled out to my sisters or my parents. I’m sure I was the one who broke it to them. Cosell scooped the world.

The Beatles weren’t even out of their 20s when they called it quits. My introduction to their music came from the usual places. Big brothers and big sisters and the radio. These songs would not go away. One of my earliest Christmas memories was finding the famous “red” double album of their early work under the tree. I had a high fever and was shivering on the couch, but underneath my blankets I clutched the record, and spinning it on the turntable burned my fever away.

I knew nothing then of Paul and Linda and John and Yoko or Apple record lawsuit chaos. The Beatles were gone already, in my mind they were old and retired. Every once in a while one of them might release a Christmas song or something. I didn’t have a favorite Beatle. I kinda agreed with George Harrison who when asked how many Beatles did it take to change a light-bulb answered “four”. John sang some and Paul sang some and George sang some and even Ringo got to belt out “Octopus’s Garden” and “With a Little Help From My Friends”. Why choose sides when you’re surrounded by friends?

So I was shocked to be reminded that Lennon was 40.

That sounded crazy to me. That was like….almost as old as my Dad.

John Lennon had been frozen in time……a perpetual mop-top who rebelled with the help of psychedelics and granny glasses. The ride from screeching “Twist and Shout” with a mouthful of lozenges to asking the rich royals to “rattle yer jewelry” to donning Yoko’s fur coat on the Apple roof seemed like a million miles, but it was actually a mad sprint that took place in a few short years. And in our heads he was now on Mount Rushmore, and the legend had begun to take over. It was easy to forget he was a newly committed husband and a proud father and still too young for grey hair. At 14, 40 sounded like an eternity. Today, I can’t remember that far backwards. John Lennon had half a life in front of him, and suddenly 40 wasn’t old anymore. It was heartrendingly, tragically young.

The details were sickening. He was executed, essentially. Four bullets in the back. In front of his wife. From a guy who asked for and graciously received an autograph a few hours earlier. Lennon’s blood-splattered glasses became a ghastly, iconic symbol of the relentless gun violence that only seemed to happen here. Vigils popped up around the world. Everybody with candles, singing “All You Need is Love” and “Give Peace a Chance”, gathering for the type of communal hug that, ironically, we all desperately need right now.

For my generation, this was our JFK moment. This was when time stood still, and when the date rolls around every year we get goosebumps.

Like JFK, Lennon was a giant of a man with giant flaws who nonetheless always fought to bend that arc towards justice. They were fearless and feared. They were saints, and they were sinners. They led from the front.

Oh the things he might have gotten up to if he lived. After years of silence, he was making music again. He was in a good place. I can’t help but think of him surrounding himself with younger musicians, the kind that would push him down the roads he hadn’t already traveled. He might have re-made the 1980s. We’ll never know. He and Paul might have pulled out the acoustic guitars and sat knee-to-knee one more time and created one last bit of magic together, just for the crack. Or he might have sat back with his son, and watched the wheels.

He might have changed the world even more than he changed the world.

In a bit..

–tf

Spotify is sending users their stats for the year…what we’ve been listening to and how often and for how long. I expect that during the pandemic the streaming services are booming. It’s unfortunate that this increased usage doesn’t trickle down to the artist, but since it’s 2020 we’re all quite used to being screwed so it’s just another “meh” in a line of “mehs”.

My top artists of the year are a varied lot. The Tragically Hip and Bob Mould and the Drive-By Truckers and Joe Henry and AC/DC and a big Van Halen surge when Eddie passed. I hate myself for supporting greedy devils like Spotify but it’s like a morphine drip and I’m always in pain. Being able to listen to Mozart and then the Menzingers, Beethoven and then the Badlees….and back again without getting out of my chair is obviously addictive. A shelf of disorganized CDs sits to the right of my desk at home, a quaint reminder of the past. In the other room sits my 160 gig Ipod, the Apollo spacecraft of its day, loaded up with over 25,000 songs, pretty much my CD collection digitized. Relics all, replaced in an instant by having the entire musical world on your smart phone for the cost of a 12 pack of PBR a month. It’s utterly insane how much we’ve devalued music. It sucks, but it’s great.

I’m struggling with my own addiction, as you can clearly see. But let’s try to stay positive, shall we?

And these small little blue tooth speakers are just as goofy, throwing sound back in my face with crispness and at a Spinal Tap-ian volume. I don’t know how these little things work, but my old school stereo sits across the room from me covered in dust, flanked by its 2 speakers, each the size of a college dorm-room refrigerator. And I don’t miss it one bit. Well, ok. Maybe I miss it a little. But my blue tooth is a lot easier to drag outside on warm summer nights. And it’s equally capable of annoying the neighbors.

Spotify allows me to soothe my inner geek as well. Always been a sorta-hidden power-pop-punk-emo type, which is kinda weird when my desk is piled with books by and about Woody Guthrie and Joe Strummer, but don’t judge me. I think The Wonder Years “Suburbia I’ve Given You All and Now I’m Nothing” is fucking great and if you don’t agree with me you’re wrong and kinda sad. My nieces and nephews used to be amazed that I had all the same records they did, because I’m really old compared to them, but I’m pretty sure I was blasting New Found Glory records before they were. So there. I adore bands that are melodic and fun and play hard and I don’t care what category somebody puts them in and I don’t care if it’s cool anymore. I’m not that big on the gang vocal thing, but I admit that after about 8 beers it can sound pretty catchy. About 10 years ago my aforementioned nephew got 50 of his buddies to ante up $100 each and they hosted the band Saves the Day for a backyard barbecue and I still haven’t forgiven him for not letting me sneak in.

Remember, you’re only as old (or young) as the music you listen to, which gives you lots of options, no?

So where do we go from here?

I can move on. Or I can stay entrenched.

I can search out the new, or seek shelter in the comfort of old friends.

It’s my own record store, and there’s no categories to plow through. The power-pop is next to the Merle Haggard bin, and the blues is mixed in with the sea shanties. And it’s open 24/7, and it’s even MORE open during pandemics. The doors have been ripped off their hinges, and rocks have been thrown through all the windows.

But still.

I miss unsealing the albums. The liner notes. The anticipation of dropping the needle. The waiting is the hardest part, but can you ever remember it not being worth it? The anticipation. Sometimes waiting in line on release day. You just HAD to have it….it was a point of honor. And you’d watch the record spinning as your listened, hard. If a song skipped, you just grinned and bore it…..the skip became part of the song. Later when you replaced your albums with CDs the song didn’t sound right, because the skip wasn’t there anymore.

It sucks. And it’s great.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

I’ll never make up my mind.

But I’ll never stop listening.

In a bit…

–tf

It’s the holidays. The time of year when folks are usually a little bit nicer. More smiles. More laughs. More time together. The pace slows down a little on the outside. The lights go up. The fences come down. We all long for Whoville. Snoopy comes to town, with Topper and the Warlock and Frosty and Rudolph and we all trust in the magic snowball.

Yea well, that’s not happening this year.

The fear is palpable. You can feel it everywhere. The virus. The rent. Food on the table. What if this? What if that? It’s dark out there…..and the temperatures are dropping. The wind howls and the black ice is around every sharp corner.

And we’re all becoming hypochondriacs. And why not? Coughs, runny noses, fatigue, body aches, fevers, ’tis the season normally. But now there’s an elephant in the room. Should I get tested? Where can I get tested? And since I’m essentially quarantining already, why get tested at all? If I’m positive, then what? All we can really do is hunker down and wait for a vaccine, or more precisely, wait for our government to not completely jack up the distribution of said vaccine. We watch the numbers, rising. Every day. Relentless. It puts a lump in the throat, which re-triggers the paranoia, because maybe lumpy throat is a covid symptom that I wasn’t aware of.

The nation is currently on auto-pilot. President Trump has long since cashed in his casino chips, and has continued to ignore the pandemic entirely, focusing instead on rage-tweeting election lies and raising money from his cult members, presumably to assist him in staying out of prison. In yet another bonk over the head, today Attorney General and Trump ball washer Bill Barr was forced to admit that his office has uncovered zero evidence of election fraud, which if the past is any indication, means he’s about to be fired via a tweet any moment now. I have to admit that this treating Trump like a pinata at a birthday party in lieu of him conceding like an actual adult is fun in a “but it’s still sorta damaging to democracy” kind of way.

As wanton cruelty was the President’s one and only presidential point, this week, as Americans die in record numbers (more Americans died from Covid in November than in Australia, Canada, China, Japan, and Germany combined) from a virus he called first called a hoax and then did nothing to contain even after he contracted it, he’s focused on changing the rules for federal death penalty cases by bringing back firing squads. Yes. FIRING SQUADS. This is truly demented, twisted, despotic stuff. And yet it’s on page 17 of the paper, because his casual brutality has become normalized.

I just went out for a walk, and the weather matches the mood. Alternating between rain and sleet, with biting winds. Everything is dark. Everything is wet. The sun is buried. My shoes were full of mud. It was lunchtime but it felt like the end of a long day. A lot of cars had their lights on. The kind of day that can give any town a bad name. I know this is all temporary, but these days one can be forgiven for throwing in the towel before it’s been handed to him.

Sports was a thing for a while during all this. The NBA and NHL bubbles somehow worked, as did the baseball playoffs. There were some bumps and bruises, but overall the games proved a welcome distraction. Football, on the other hand, which is essentially bubble-proof, is gradually turning into a shit show. College games in the Trumpier areas are being played with tens of thousands of people in the stands….welcome news for an airborne virus. As I type this the Steelers / Ravens have had their scheduled Thanksgiving prime time game re-scheduled 4 times, and it’s now to be played at a most un-football like day and time….Wednesday at 3:40pm. It really has no business being played at all, since the Ravens team is infested with the virus. On Sunday the Denver Broncos were forced to play an actual game that counts using a practice squad wide-receiver at quarterback, which is kinda like the bat-boy pitching a MLB game. This happened because the 3 actual QBs on the Broncos roster gathered and refused to wear masks, and came into direct contact with a positive test. The result was perhaps the worst game in the history of the league. If the NFL was embarrassed by any of this, they got over it once the TV revenue checks cleared. Money, as always, trumps (sorry) everything.

That being said, the mask goes OVER YOUR FUCKING NOSE. I’m not sure what it’s gonna take for folks to grasp this simple concept. Does it need to be engraved on tombstones?

In a bit..

–tf

We’ve all got lots to be thankful for, but one might be forgiven in 2020 for losing the plot. Things are getting crazy again, shutdowns and tears of rage and being told that the simple act of gathering as a family to share a meal is akin to playing a game of Russian Roulette. Facebook erupted yesterday when the Governor announced stopping booze sales at 5pm on Thanksgiving Eve, normally the busiest bar night of the year. Nobody is quite sure how much longer they can hold on. It’s like the threat of an invasion from the Bumpus Hounds is hovering over all of us.

Patience. Toilet paper. Hand Sanitizer. All gone. The only thing we’re not running out of is curse words. It’s a bit refreshing to know that soon grown-ups will be in charge, but it’s gonna take a while for them to clean up the mess the crazy kids made. Meanwhile, my $1200 was gobbled up instantaneously, and that feels like it was a century ago. The government has become a large, tweeting echo chamber. Everybody has fallen, and nobody can get up except for that Jeff Bezos fella. We want to be….I don’t know…..reassured? Spoken to like adults? Told what the plan is for the distribution of these vaccines? What’s the time frame? Covid testing was and is a complete shit-show. Is there any reason to expect a vaccine won’t be? By my count there are 3 different drug companies with vaccines. One is 95% effective, and one is 70% effective. Does that mean one wins and the other is out? Or that some will just have to gamble with the B team? It’s like the paratrooper being reminded as he’s waiting for that tap on his leg that his parachute was made by the lowest bidder.

Not all of us knew somebody who tested positive during the first wave. This time? We all do. Concentric circles. Trying to keep the thing out is like the diner scene from “The Blob”. Or, all of us be like Rod Taylor in “The Birds”…armed with only a hammer and a few nails.

Can you get it again? I just checked online and the answers I got were “yes”, “no”, “maybe”, “we don’t know” and “in 6 months perhaps”.

We live in a nation where 7% of the population believes that chocolate milk comes from brown cows, so our future was pretty terrifying even without 2020 ever happening. Watching this year unravel has been like trying to fix a tangled cassette tape. You’ve got a fighting chance at the beginning….but the longer you drag it out, the more insanely frustrated you get, until you lose your mind and yank it all to smithereens. We’re kinda at that moment right now.

We’ve all got different hats we wear. The musician side of me has no idea what the future holds. Gigs are gone…..a few returned when the weather was warm and tents became a thing, but now the freeze is upon us and they’re gone. At the beginning of the pandemic the live streamed shows were a novelty, and had great support. Virtual tip jars were filled up. Then everybody started doing them and they weren’t a novelty anymore. You’re not walking into a filled bar anymore. You’re standing in the middle of the virtual street tying to wave down cars. But we enjoy playing. So we play. Come join us….or at least honk your horn as you’re driving by.

I’ve seen the Charlie Brown Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center, so I have no idea what Times Square has planned for New Year’s Eve. Maybe the ball will drop on somebody’s head. 2020 can’t last forever….and soon the number will roll over, and the suckiness will troll 2021 HARD, and we’ll all regroup in a few weeks and compare notes.

Wear a mask. Keep your social distance. Support and be supportive. Try to understand that behind the mask everybody is a little heart-sick right now. We’re not made for isolation. We need human touch. But we’ve got to get through this. The virus doesn’t move on its own. It has to be carried. And if we can just hunker down long enough for it to wither and die on the proverbial vine, maybe it won’t feel like it does right now…..like it starts to get dark right after lunch.

We’ll soon leave the year of the Bumpus Hounds behind. Time promises nothing but forward movement.

In a bit..

–tf

I can’t believe we are back here again.

People are dying at an unprecedented rate (We just passed 250,000 deaths, which is what Fauci predicted. He was then called an “idiot” by his boss). The President has all but abdicated, mad-tweeting in his alternate universe and sending his legal minions across the land to duly humiliate themselves in court, trying to prove non-existent fraud. He will not concede, so the President-elect and his people will be coming in blind on day one. The nation is rudderless. It’s like a horror movie. ICUs are at capacity, and they may soon have no choice but to send people away, which means sending them back home to die. All this, in the so-called greatest nation on earth, in the year 2020. Merry Christmas.

Doctors Without Borders are sent to places in the world facing medical catastrophes. They are here now. In the United States.

We were asked to sacrifice. Like our fathers and grandfathers were. They were called to wars overseas. They considered it their duty, and they went. We were asked to stay home if at all possible, and wear a mask if we did go out. This could possibly save the lives of our fathers and grandfathers. But we refused. We whined. We ignored science. We argued that we had the absolute right to kill another. We took to social media to belittle and malign, to spread lies and disinformation, and showed a nationwide selfish gene that must have staggered the greatest generation. We embarrassed ourselves from the top down. And now a quarter million people are dead that should be alive. At current rates, Covid-19 deaths in the United States will surpass American WWII deaths by January.

It’s difficult to comprehend.

Where does this startling lack of empathy come from? This appalling ignorance?

How is this the same nation the sprearheaded the D-Day invasion and destroyed the greatest evil the world had ever seen, and then came home and didn’t really consider the sacrifice all that worthy of talking about? How is this the same fucking planet?

It’s perhaps too easy to blame Trump for all this. He’s a cartoonish figure…..a shuffling, obese jackass with what looks like a ferret stuck to his head. A man with no intellect. No sense of humor. No compassion. No sense of honor. No moral compass. Hell, not even a dog. He doesn’t read. He can’t spell. I get it. The Jesusidians didn’t like the non-white fella, and they hated the woman. But this was shooting at the fly with a machine gun. Nobody should be surprised that he destroyed the entire house. It wasn’t like he turned into an asshole. He clearly already was one. So this one is kinda on us. It’s hard to argue that a nation dumb enough to vote for a Donald Trump doesn’t kinda deserve all the wreckage that comes with that fateful decision.

And what’s going on now is not at all surprising. He’s been saying all along that he would only accept the results of the election if he won it. Which is an outrageous statement for a sitting American President to make. But we all yawned. Leading Republicans continued to fan him and feed him grapes. His cult cheered. The press barely stirred. And here we are.

He’s hiding behind the only wall he managed to build, which is the one around the White House. His schedule is empty. He has forbidden any member of his administration to speak to the Biden team. He golfed all weekend. He hasn’t attended a Covid task force meeting in months. All of his recent tweets are immediately flagged with a “this is complete bullshit” warning. It’s surreal.

Like many others I let my guard down for a bit over the last few weeks. I wore my mask…..but I was going places I really didn’t need to go to. The weather was fine and we all sorta got lulled. We got together and fist-bumped and elbow-bumped and talked of things getting back to whatever normal used to be. The virus went from the foreground to the background. The election allowed us all a chance to (figuratively) exhale. Finally, an adult was gonna be in charge. Things were gonna get better because they couldn’t get worse.

And now things are worse than ever. The virus the cult claimed would magically vanish after election day has not followed the script. Once again MAGAs have been betrayed by pesky science.

And now kids are coming home from colleges. Extended families will gather around Thanksgiving tables. If the virus had chops it would be licking them.

There’s good news on the vaccine front, but mobilizing to make these available to all requires herculean efforts. And, dare I say, cooperation between the outgoing and incoming administrations. Lives are at stake. And Trump doesn’t care.

He’s never cared if we lived or died. He’s bragged about being able to shoot supporters and not lose their devotion. Now he’s tossing them onto ventilators.

This nation is on the precipice.

The job ahead of Biden is as daunting at the one that faced Lincoln. That sounds like absurd hyperbole but it’s not.

At all.

In a bit…

–tf

A quick trip on Saturday to Gettysburg. Hallowed ground.

Went down with my good friend Chuck Gudatis, who served as my tour guide. I’ve toured the battlefield maybe 5 times previously, but it’s so large that it helps to have somebody that can point you in the right direction when you start to get geographically confused. Chuck estimates that he’s been there 80 times, and knows every road….every corner….every short cut…..every troop movement. And he’s got a wealth of stories to go with it. No better company.

It was a gorgeous day, deep blue sky and a gentle fall breeze. Not crazy crowded like it can get in the summer. You could stretch your legs without having to worry about getting hit by a tour bus.

51,000 men fell here….and one woman. Jenny Wade was baking bread in her sister’s house when a stray bullet crashed through the door and pierced her heart, the only civilian casualty of those 3 horrible days. As you drive into town on Baltimore St, the small Wade house is on your right, wedged between the massive parking lot of a charmless visitor’s center and a former Holiday Inn motel, directly across the street from a convenient store that on previous visits we raided for 6 packs of beer. The 20/21st century has trolled the 19th HARD in Gettysburg….so get used to this sort of thing. If you continue into town and are interested in where Lincoln stayed the night before he delivered the Gettysburg Address, it’s easy to find. Look for the tall dude giving what looks like directions to a tourist wearing a Clancy Brother’s sweater, 90s corduroys, and Dad-sneakers. It might be one of the most ridiculous statues ever commissioned, and it’s things like this that make serious Civil War buffs lose their minds. (And I haven’t even gotten to the McDonald’s within a pistol shot of the Confederate high water mark on Cemetery Ridge…the one next to General Pickett’s Buffet…)

But I digress.

It’s a strange time….with a pandemic raging. We wore masks, but hardly anybody else did. So we did our best to be as socially distant as possible, but since we’re from NEPA that wasn’t too hard. We stayed out of the town, and ate lunch on Seminary Ridge, next to the weirdly proportioned James Longstreet statue, which looks like the General on a carousel ride. Longstreet did not want to fight here, and had the temerity to criticize Robert E Lee when doing so was akin to spitting in somebody’s food. Lee’s own garish statue, sitting on top of the Virginia monument, is so close it practically throws shade. It’s the size of a house, and he looks like Zeus on top of it…..and I can’t help thinking that his lost-cause cult members had something to do with this….er….imbalance.

We were soon gazing across that infamous mile. To the copse of trees. And once again tried to imagine the unimaginable. 12,500 men marched out of these woods, into hell. Half of them would never return. It’s called a “charge”, but they did no such thing. They walked. And a single exploding artillery shell could take out 10 of them at a time. They simply closed ranks and kept walking. The tactics of the Civil War were from the days of Napoleon. The weapons were modern. The carnage was ghastly. So much of the bravery was wasted. As we walked across the field I could not keep my eyes off those trees. “Home boys. Home is just beyond those hills….” is what one Confederate General yelled out, right before he had his head blown off. It seemed madness. I was suddenly mindful of every step. And I wondered how I would have measured up. If the confederacy had to rely on my bravery, I suspect they would not have made it this far.

Being on that field is like being in a church. Even a non-believer keeps his voice down, out of respect. It was once the loudest spot in North America (the cannonade could be heard in Harrisburg). Today, you can hear the brown grass crunching under your feet, and the songs of the crickets. I could set up microphones out here and record music.

Gettysburg is the kind of place that tosses your memories around. Little Round Top is one of the most famous spots on the field, and as I mentioned I’ve been up there before. Even so, I was shocked to find the location of the 20th Maine marker well below the summit, practically behind the line. Not at all what I remembered. I finally understood what it meant to be the flank of the army on that day. If the 20th Maine had not stood firm, the confederates would have crashed into the rear of the army and driven it off the ridge. The war might have ended that day, if not for 300 Maine men and a crazy bayonet charge. I always suspected there was a bit of hyperbole to the legend. There was not.

Another thing I missed on other visits were the private homes in the park itself, some in the paths of the standard auto-tour stops. Not much privacy, but a front row seat for sure. One featured a sign for our times. “This battle was fought BECAUSE Black Lives Matter”. Gettysburg has bizarrely become a sort of MAGA backwater, a place where armed militias gather to wave confederate and Trump flags. One might call this the high water mark of the failure of our education system. Whatever. It made me feel good to know that some folks at least were aware that the south lost.

Onward we moved. Through Devil’s Den and the Peach Orchard and into the Wheatfield, three of the most savage locations on earth, filled with blood and ghosts and men and epic battlefield blunders blunted only by immense sacrifice and suffering. To drive through here as darkness closes in will test any skepticism that the dead always remain that way.

And then the PA memorial on Cemetery Ridge, which lists the names of the 34,530 soldiers from the Keystone state that fought here….fully a third of the Union Army. It’s the largest monument on the field, and it needs, and deserves, to be.

Meade’s headquarters. In Gettysburg those 3 days you took what you could get. The Leister house is about the size of a single car garage, and you can walk in its yard and peer into its windows, trying to imagine that last council of war…generals packed inside literally wall to wall. It’s well behind the lines, but the confederate artillery bombardment that preceded Pickett’s charge mostly fired wild high, so the place took a beating. An orderly serving the Generals butter for lunch was cut into 2 pieces by a shell. The front yard was still covered with disemboweled horses 4 days after the battle. The widow who owned the house counted 17 of them.

The high water mark…our last stop before leaving town. Where the federal line angled out…..and 1500 Virginians broke through the line, and for one tantalizing moment it looked like maybe….but no. Every man who breached the line was either killed or captured. And that was that. Close your eyes, and all around you were masses of men, engaged in a sweaty, blood-soaked, murderous fist-fight. It wasn’t just bodies that carpeted the ground. It was body parts. Heads. Arms. Legs. Perhaps this was the pinnacle of our national madness. All the casualties were Americans. We’ve been trying to heal ourselves ever since.

To visit this place is to be energized and exhausted at the same time. The more you visit, the more you learn. The more you notice. The deeper you feel. The incredulity. The melancholia. The awe.

And the more the place gets its hooks into you.

In a bit..

–tf

There’s a new AC/DC record out today. It’s called “Power Up” and because it sounds like every other AC/DC record that means it kicks ass and is pretty much exactly what the world needs right now. They are the freight train that always runs on-time.

My friend Alan Stout shared a great Angus Young quote with me today..

“People say we’ve made 11 records and they all sound the same. That’s not true at all. We’ve made 12 records that all sound the same.”

For those about to rock, they’ve been saluting you for 47 years. Malcolm is gone but the crunch has stayed in the family. Stevie Young fills the enormous shoes of his uncle. All the songs are credited to Malcolm and Angus (according to Angus the vaults are overflowing with riffs and song ideas over the years, so don’t expect this record to be their last), and it’s great to hear Brian Johnson’s ageless howl again. All the songs are about whatever it is AC/DC songs are about, mostly sex and Satan, sometimes both at the same time. The lyrics remain absolutely, ridiculously un-woke…

You got a long night comin’
And a long night pumpin’
You got the right position
The heat of transmission

…but Johnson screeches with such a lascivious leer that he could make Shakespeare sound filthy. And I only know the above couplets because I googled them. So, what lyrics? Don’t bore us, get to the chorus. There’s enough monster riffs here to keep guitar teachers busy for months.

No drum fills or ballads allowed. One of my favorite records of theirs was the last one, “Rock or Bust”, and on first few listens “Power Up” is keeping up. This band is so reliable it’s goofy.

I remember being in 8th grade and desperately wanting to impress this girl. Her birthday was coming up. So of course I bought her “Back in Black” on cassette, because that’s just what you did back then. And for about a week she liked me. You don’t forget bands like that.

Of course I also bought a copy for myself, which is what you did back then too. The thing sold a kerbillion copies. Everybody was buying it for their girl and themselves. If a girl didn’t like AC/DC, she wasn’t worth your 14 year old time. And if she liked them then, you know she still likes them now.

I remember this crazy YouTube thing posted by some whacked out fans who traveled to Australia to find out where Angus lived. They were gonna knock on his door and tell him just how awesome he was…..and found his house super easy…..a low-key ranch in a suburb in Sydney or something….no mansion….no fences….no security. Neighbors had told these guys that Angus kept up a pretty regular schedule….heading to the corner store for cigarettes at the same time every day and stuff like that. They were terrified that it was this easy….and eventually got up the nerve to knock on the front door, and of course Angus answered, and besides being a bit perplexed that these lunatics flew halfway around the world to say hello, he was about as chill as a guy could be. Seeing this was about as cool as hearing “Whole Lotta Rosie” for the first time.

And speaking of, I had no idea Bon Scott was dropping Rosie’s measurements in that song until way later….but I did manage to twist my virgin guitar fingers into an approximation of that killer riff, and when that happened it was like the parting of the red sea. Press on son, press on. And I did. And I still am. (Years ago I wrote that if Tipper Gore could put a parental warning sticker on a riff, it would be from “Whole Lotta Rosie”)

I have no idea how much longer these guys can keep this up. I mean…..Angus is 65 years old and still wearing his school boy uniform and devil horns, and Brian Johnson is almost deaf. Early-onset dementia stole Malcolm. Their drummer pleaded guilty in 2015 and served 8 months for threatening to kill a former employee. There’s lots to think about, clearly. Normally they’d be taking this record around the world on tour, but Covid ain’t going anywhere. No telling how many folks are knocking on Angus’s door these days. Like everybody else, they know he’s home.

But it’s 2020. And we need something that doesn’t suck. We need this record, and this band.

Thank you boys…

In a bit..

–tf