“Have you ever considered moving?” he queried as more of a recommendation rather than a matter of curiosity.

Hmm…

I had long recognized that this ADA was a graduate from one of the numerous law schools where the ticket for diploma is merely the lack of a conscience. I was impressed when he remembered to show up in court with his fly zipped, and his socks matching. But, indeed, he apparently didn’t remember that my deep and meaningful liaison with ‘trouble’ is the only relationship that has never divorced me.

It wasn’t any of his doing that got the pedophile, who pursued my older young son for three years, sent away for 4 years. It was my doing. And my future ex-wife’s.

I fought the tall muscular behemoth physically, emotionally and finally legally. That is, armed with years of documentation, I told the DA’s office that it better ‘finally’ take this case or I, along with some hearty assistants, would be taking this reprobate to some deep tomb for unknown miscreants.

Now this ADA was calling. His message was that the 6-foot-four-inch, two hundred and 40 pound pedophile had spent his entire four-year sentence lifting weights. And rejecting any rehab. And he was determined to come back to return to his old hunting grounds in Philadelphia.

Hmm…

Really?

Where is he imprisoned? I asked

And after the ADA informed me, I made a call to one of my heavyweight professional boxing friends. I asked simply if he and one of his even larger palookas would be willing to take a trip with me and deliver a ‘Come-to-Jesus’ speech.

And so we did. And while, admittedly, I was not in the room at the time of the sermon, I will tell you that the other big boxing pug recounted fondly, on the long drive there, his manner of reshaping people’s criminal, if not merely annoying, recalcitrance.

“I like to make them bleed a little,” he said, exhaling with great taste licking at his lips.  “Not too much. But not too little.”

He must be very convincing. Because after their private discourse the gnarled-fingered pugilist offered me a bent smile as he related: “He’s decided to move to California.”

Hmm… I must remember to inform the ADA that he was wrong. On a day of his last weeks of incarceration the convict went through 4 years of rehabilitation.

Now that’s what I call a wonderful school of psychotherapy. Over years of writing and viewing the world from a front row seat I have discovered there’s no better advice than a good scare. It’s like a scar – mental, emotional or physical.

A scar, even metaphoric, is a glorious reminder. It’s a great communicator. There is much less misunderstanding. And it serves as a memento that there are always consequences… for the past, the present and what’s-to-come.

Hmm… The bloody lawyers may have kidnapped justice and hid it in the cellars of the law. But I wasn’t seeking anyone’s permission.

Which is what I was seeking to explain to a psychiatric social worker yesterday. Much like that rather pedestrian ADA of previous years, this social worker called to inform me that the man from whom I have been renting the house’s top floor was about to be released from his ‘mental’ vacation at his institution.

You may recall this is the same tall gentlemen with a big belly and small feet who has trouble – at times – keeping his ‘balance.’

And some 17 days ago he apparently went off his pills, terrorized the neighborhood again, annihilated the house and killed his beloved cat. Then he came at me with a machete-size kitchen knife and hammer.

Hmm…

Did I happen to mention I am not a brave man. I have already died a thousand deaths. But with so many exes, my only possible escape – I call it my pension plan — is to one day step in front of a speeding furniture truck.

That takes much bigger bowling balls than the ones my over-circumcised winky rests upon. So in the meanwhile I practice, practice, practice to hone the ‘right stuff.’

So, while I was ‘practicing’ my chutzpah with an armed Pete the cops finally arrived on a neighbor’s call.

And guess, what? Since I wasn’t a relative, and there were none about, they couldn’t commit him. So I asked, after the haunting experiences with my ex-wife (who now seems to have been Pete’s transgendered twin, by the way): “What if this was domestic violence?”

That, to them, was clear cut.

So, I said I wasn’t the boarder. I said that…and then this. And I was as straight-faced as a lawyer begging for the court’s mercy because his client, who killed his own parents, was now an orphan. I said that I wasn’t the boarder… I said: I am Pete’s lover.

At first the police, especially the one with whom I’ve shared cigar smoke, were a tad overtly skeptical. But to tell you the truth they really didn’t care anymore than I did. If that’s what it takes to move the system towards benefiting the victim, then so be it. They just wanted to know if I would be willing – if need be – to testify to that.

I simply shrugged. I don’t care, no more! Besides, at my age it could only enhance my reputation.

And that was this and that.

Now over two weeks later this social worker is telling me that the psychiatrist at the center where Pete has been a guest, is stipulating that Pete is perfectly okay to be released to come home.

Fine, I said. But besides me, I wondered, who will accept or suffer the consequences?

I had to explain that if Pete’s psychiatrist was wrong – like apparently a number of psychiatrists before with Pete – then was the discharging doc capable of accepting the consequences. I mean, besides sending my family the ceremonial posthumous ‘regrets’.

The social worker didn’t seem to comprehend. All he could muster had the same echo of the cheap advice from that Judge when he was an ADA:

“We did advise you to move.”

Hmm….

“You did?”

Then he admitted that this was our first conversation but that he had suggested to another caller to urge me to change residences.

I said I am in the process. But I am not fleeing!

“When does the victim ever stop being victimized?” I asked the insouciant  young voice on the other end of my cell. “No one has inquired as to my wounds. Or my state of mind. And now you want to further victimize me like some abused spouse. You want me to seek any shelter from the storm.”

At that I explained a tad stridently that I refuse to be a victim! I will not be victimized. And therefore if matters are placed in my bailiwick then I will adjudicate. It may not be exactly kosher. Someone may bleed a little… or a little too much. But so be it!

Then I suggested he put the discharging psychiatrist on the phone. Or he should relate what I have spoken. That is: Consequences will resonate. You can’t hide behind the bureaucratic wall. There isn’t enough lamb’s blood you can spread on your doorposts.

If the world – and especially our government’s blatantly vague laws – is going to drive us all crazy, then it is going to have to accept the crazy, and perhaps bloody, repercussions. If no one draws a clear picture, then matters get awfully abstract.

I am happy they are releasing Pete from the hospital. But I’d be happier if I knew that someone – the cops, the courts, the social workers and docs — recognized that something is eventually going to happen. Whether in the time remaining that I am still there, or at another time or another place. Like Newport Connecticut. Or a movie theater in Colorado.  Or from someplace on high, like from a drone. Or from a guardsman at Kent State or Jackson State. Or merely like a windshield on a bug. And they all stand around stupidly muttering in the madness: “Nothing like this ever happened ‘round here before.”

And then there is somebody like me who is just bloody fed up with the incompetence that rules us, then mugs us. Much like the cavalry that comes charging out of the hills, waving its shiny cutlasses to assault the wounded.

I will not be a victim. I will not abide by some insane rules created by insane people who refuse to recognize the insanity reflected in their own bathroom vanities.

Like I told Pete that night he came at me armed, dangerous, and with the possessed eyes of something ugly: All I know is how to kill, or die trying. Anything in between is not on my resumè.

And dats yDrewIS on dis penal colony…

The woman I was passed along to was the supervisor – the head, the chief, the authority in charge, she said, of ‘the entire Washington government building’ where my telephone call had been switched, pitched, ditched and hitched.

And this woman, who would only identify herself as ‘Theresa’ and no more, kept repeating in that maddening, patronizing manner that she was: “…so sorry. I can’t help you….I can’t answer that. But is there anything more I can (not) do for you?”

And all I could think at this moment of exasperation was that a government that is big enough give all you need — as well as what it orders you to need — is also a government too big to give most anything you need… And in the end: Takes all your needs away…

Hmm… I think I got that right….but read it thrice…

As you readers of my once and twice a week essays know, particularly from my March 13th and May 22^nd columns, I have been trying for months to replace my passport  my ex-wife stole along with most everything else. She was, at first, aided and abetted by a government official named Philadelphia Assistant District Attorney Kate Thurston.

Ms Thurston would later drop, punt, kick and withdraw all the egregious charges. That is, after she – and most everyone else who had been seduced by their fellow femme fatale – could no longer believe my mentally turmoiled ex – Stephanie Blatt.

And afterwards, when I sought Miserable Thurston’s retribution to help reclaim my life – or at least ‘my stuff’ — this woman who likes to dress in manly pant suits, replied: “Get a lawyer…”

All I could say in return to ADA Kate Thurston was: “I thought I was speaking to one.”

Right now, however, my problem was the Washington passport supervisor, Theresa. I call her: ‘Mother Theresa.’ She is obviously indicative of our government sinecures.

You see, due to government delays, incompetence, lost files and incivility the 90-day deadline for my passport application was about to expire.

And, naturally, I would lose all my money, time, parking fees, place in line and lingering sanity. And then I would have to re-enter the process with all new security pat-downs, photographs and redundancy of insane questions — as well as more money, personal time and popping my repaired heart gaskets all over again.

And all I wanted to know was how many days I had left to get her the final government document – an official copy of my birth certificate — before I got trashed. In other words: When is my 90-days up?

“I can’t tell you that,” she said, before again bleating, “Sorry…”

Can you give me a ballpark guesstimate? I asked.

“Sorry…I can’t do that?”

Can you tell me what you can do?

“I can put a note in your file.”

Will that get me a 30-day extension on my passport application?

“I don’t know. Probably not. I’m sure they won’t even see it. I can’t say the note would do any good… sorry…”

Then why would you say you would do something that does absolutely no good…..What do you do, Theresa?

“I answer questions,” she complied, and for the only time, not saying she was sorry.

Now folks, I am not making any of this up. My many, many pointed questions were beaten into blubbering plowshares by the percussion of non-speak and bureaucratese from this anything-but ‘Mother’ Theresa.

Obviously I don’t know Theresa from any other incivil servant who seeks holy sanctuary behind the faceless fog of government bureaucracy. But if I had to reckon a guess from the officious sound of her irritating, over polite and disingenuous voice I would say:

She is a fastidious, ‘youngish,’ Middle-Ages woman who regularly rises to chomp her capped teeth on a couple dozen eggs and pork sausages just to crank up the early breakfast suicide trucks, pouring down the high cholesterol, to cement-up the blood, already barely trickling, to her malnourished medulla oblongata.

At the same time, she no doubt has a meticulously clean, tidy clerk’s desk — spawning the apropos bumper sticker: A neat desk is the sign of a very sick mind.

And right now, about lunchtime, I seemed to be road-blocking between she and her KFC feedbag wafting from upon her colorless doilies.

What I asked again was: Did my 90-day deadline extend from March 10^th , the day that I reapplied for my passport. I could easily recall the day because it was the one Saturday of the only weekend a year that the passport office in the Customs House in Philadelphia is open. That also happens to be the date of an ex-wife’s (my first, I think) birthday.

“I can’t tell you that…” replied Theresa. “I don’t know…sorry…”

The problem, as I tried to inform Mother Theresa on duh phone, was that even though the dour passport clerk that March day could pull up, on his huge computer, my old passport, still with three-years of eligibility, and my entire life story on and off the records, he still insisted on proof of citizenship.

That isn’t something I would be required to have if I was just renewing my passport. Which, in effect, is all I was doing – since he could see and review my stolen one.

Isn’t it? I asked Mother Theresa.

“I can’t answer that,” she bleated. “I can’t tell you… I don’t know…sorry…”

Anyway, the Philadelphia passport clerk had wanted some proof other than what I was demonstrating with my Driver’s License, voter card, credit cards, medical cards, membership cards… I was even willing to show him my genital tattoos…How about a pix of me with the Jewish Pope?…

But he wanted a birth certificate.

And since I was undoubtedly the very first person in the history of the passport office who didn’t have his Birth Certificate in possession, they would have to send me – instead of having one to just hand me — an application to fill out. In turn I would mail it into the Pennsylvania state bureau of vital statistics to obtain an official copy of my BC.

“It will only take a couple of days,” he said.

By the way, in Moscow they once replaced my stolen passport in one working day…And without an official copy of my BC.

I finally received my one-page application form with a letter dated April 13^th. That’s 34 days later  — even on the Mayan calendar.

And I immediately rocket-shipped it off to the Pennsylvania vital statistics place with the one-page form meticulously edited, all the SASE’s required, the pre-paid money order as well as a ‘clear’ photocopy of my driver’s license.

Six weeks go by. And I check on the Vital Statistics joint only to learn that they won’t be getting to little ol’ me for 14 weeks. That’s 98 days. And that’s from the date my pre-paid money order clears. Remember, I started this passport retrieval process for a speaking engagement I was to host in Kiev on May 15 – 66 days from the outset.

Obviously I am toast. Or, as they say in Kiev: Chicken.

Hmm…

But after a number of phone calls and acerbic e-mail exchanges and another poignant column – that no doubt prompted a few high end political calls — I landed in the soon-to-become competent lap of Robin Carran.

Ms Carran, my new-best-friend, finally sticks an enema into her end of government constipation – even though I must resend her all the information I sent the statistics’ bureau over 6 weeks before, but now couldn’t be located.

Ms. Carran even agreed to call the Washington passport people to officially verify – from one smelly official title to another – that my birth certificate is being sent to me.

Honest…

But civil servants know better than the rest of us that there are no honest people in government.

So even a fellow civil servant gets the same sniffing, uncivil, condescending answers I do:

“We can’t even talk to you… unless you are the applicant….”

And, of course, they can’t talk to me, either, even though I am the applicant.

So that’s why I am ‘conversing’ with Mother Theresa in far away Washington passport land. Even though she ‘can’t’ tell me when my drop dead deadline is on my 90-day limit I explain to her the math: 90 days from March 10^th would be June 8^th.

“I can’t tell you that,” she re-repeated. “…sorry…”

She then let something slip that made me clearly realize that she had my whole life on-and-off-the-records displayed before her computer screen.

“You received a letter from us on April 13^th,” she said.

What was the date, you said? I asked, even though I had the letter filed at home.

“I’m not sure… Don’t you have the letter?”

Didn’t you just reference an April 13^th letter?

“I don’t know… Don’t you have a copy?”

Not with me!!!!???

Well, can you tell me if the 90-day deadline is from the date of the letter or my checking in on March 10^th.

“I can’t tell you that…I don’t know… I’m not sure…sorry…”

Finally I surrendered. I had withstood more inhumanity in the past 49 minutes and 43 seconds than any sensory-deprived divorced man is deemed capable – even under the rules of war covered in the Geneva Conventions.

She finally said that I should write yet another letter to the passport officials explaining my situation. She didn’t know where I should send it. And I couldn’t e-mail it to her because she said she either didn’t have e-mail, or couldn’t receive letters… “sorry…”

You mean, I said, I should write yet another missive pointing out that the stupidity, arrogance, delays and incompetence of ‘pusillanimous poseurs of parsimonious pulchritude,’ such as yourself….

“What did you call me?!” she demanded.

As they say in South Philly: Fer-ged-da-bout-it!!!!

I asked Theresa, quite frankly, that if her department sets the rules and makes the rules and enforces them…how can I comply with them if I don’t know what they are?  Seems a tad bizarre to those of us who aren’t ‘misologist…’

“What did you call me?!”

She said there was no one she could call to help me, even though I had complied with the instructions and adhered to the rules and regulations. She repeated that I should write a letter.

I know, I know…I could have gone to my Representative, or a lawyer, or any of the cottage industries flourishing to expedite and compensate for the insolent, insipid, arrogant, scurrilous, ignominious shit our uncivil servants make us eat.

They, along with our politicians, should be slowly hung by their gonads and burned in the public squares. And don’t tell me it’s better here than in other places …like Italy.

Remember Moscow?

Nevertheless, we are supposed to be far and away the best…the standard, the torch….’We’ are supposed to be a righteous country!!

But I needed to go through it to know, feel and comprehend what most folks endure — especially those without connections to power and money. And not just for a passport. This is indicative of the powerlessness and humiliations many endure day-in and day-out.

We are a people that should be judged by how we treat other people in society who can neither help us or hurt us. And obviously we treat them like the hired help – our incivil servants – treat us. As I learned back on the farm: Never treat your dogs like humans, because they will end up treating you like dogs…

This is abominable. We squander our money, our resources, our public debate on Iraq and Afghanistan while the debauchery and degeneracy slithers in our own back yards and public institutions.

Yes, government is terrible. And, indeed, hell is other people.  But we get the government we deserve…for duh people…by duh people…and of duh (in)civil servants….

And dats yDrewIS on DIS penal colony…

We are actually praying that our hockey team, or basketball team or baseball team will pardon our desperate hearts with the ecstasy of a climactic moment. You know: OH, LORD! GIMME ALL YOU GOT, AND MAKE IT HURT!

The only part that confuses me – sort of – is that when, say, tavern patrons are downright, drunkenly jubilant about – say, a Philadelphia Flyers win in their potentially 28-game pugilistic playoff campaign to seize the Stanley Cup.

They are cheering for some Flyers players who may have banged the boards for the opposing team, or some other mercenary team of endeavor just last season. Or, some former Flyers, who they cheered and endeared last season, are, maybe this season, sticking their pucks in nets they once condomed off.

SCORE!!!!!!

And the crowd: ROARED!!!!….Kill duh bums!

Hmm….

Okay, fill me in here: What is it all for?

Just to say: Our boys from Saskatchewan (that’s the western Canadian hockey kingdom for you folks who’ve never got past the Niagara Falls honeymoon suite) can beat your boys from Saskatchewan?

Or, as that Toronto Blue Jays baseball announcer smugly boasted to the homefolks the year after the Canadian team won the World Series off Philadelphia: “For the first time we can say that our Americans are better than their Americans.”

So what’s duh point of it all?

Whats-a-madda-wit-youse? Your balls get stuck in some dark bowling alley?

Let me enlighten you. And remember, the first step of enlightenment begins with disillusionment – that the Williams girls can hit his tennis balls harder than Arnold Schwarzenegger can hit theirs.

First, get over your pathetic, paltry, pusillanimous pouting. These are not merely sports teams playing just another game. That’s like diss-ing duh Grand Canyon as being just another hole in Arizona.

This ranks right up there with the Father, Son and Holy Ghost stuff. More sacred than the cash cow generated by Weapons of Mass Destruction, the Easter Bunny and the engineering of Alaska’s ‘Bridge to Nowhere.’

Look, if your team loses the Super Bowl that’s worse than death. I mean, with death you don’t have to get up and listen to all the ‘bragging rights’ the next morning – except perhaps in Afghanistan where they scratch their scruffy beards, and blow halitosis wondering how bad can it be when Christian satans are knocking the hell out of each other…and just for sport of it.

Hmm…

But there’s always hope for them.

Perhaps they should try baseball.

I love baseball. Not because it’s almost the only orderly thing in a very disorderly world — I mean, if you get three strikes, even the best lawyer in the world can’t get you off unless the juvenile judges are from Pennsylvania’s Luzerne County — but because in baseball you can always advance yourself: If you don’t succeed at first, you can always try second base… until your girlfriend lights up your face.

Yoooo! Mama!

The great baseball player Satchel Paige used to mistakenly think the two most powerful forces in the world were money and women, which, naturally, incorporates the most powerful force in the universe: horniness. Because you’d do things for them you wouldn’t do for anything else.

Man just can’t help himself.

Well, I am here to tell you that sports are more powerful than governments in breaking down barriers. As the great Nelson Mandela stipulated: “Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire, the power to unite people that little else has.”

Hmm…

I wonder what sport some of my exes and I could have united under in order for me to keep my alimony payments?

It couldn’t have been hockey. Because, when I watch a hockey game I get to thinking about smacking that hard headed puck at the goalie the way my ex-wife and her lesbian lover are no doubt smacking battery operated toys at each other.

Hmm…I forget those things when I am drunk and comatose after duh game’s over and out.

With my diminutive last ex – Ms. Stephanie — maybe I could have taken up that Australian sport of midget tossing.

Nah…the bar’s plate glass window would just get in duh way.

But while we’re in the Aussie nutcracking milieu, how’s about rugby? I more than enjoy its violence, especially when they start biting each other’s ears off.

Hmm…maybe I got that confused with boxing. Which I sometimes get confused with ballet, except there’s no music, no choreography and the dancers hit each other until one of them takes a ‘swan’ dive — but not exactly into the lake.

Sports teach you what you need to know about lots of stuff. Like basketball is often considered the ultimate male-bonding ritual.

Oy! And you’re wishing that the guys could just go off into the woods, kill something and be done with it.

Sports, like soccer, can serve to illustrate, as does biology, that the games of life can make you harder than Spice makes David Beckham. Especially if you’re the goal keeper in a game that’s often compared to a fertility festival: That is, 11 sperm kicking and screaming to score into the egg.

Hmm…. Maybe that’s what they mean when they say there are fools, bloody fools and men who ‘remount’ the horse — in a steeple chase.

But let’s not get a little head for ourselves. I don’t mean that you don’t have to give one now and then for the team. But I do wonder at times that if a synchronized swimmer drowns, do the rest have to drown, too?

Will keep you negative on the pregnancy test, however.

Oh, well. Thinking about all these sports is more exercising and exhausting than what men usually think about. And probably more satisfying. Because, I’ve got to think that winning the World Cup has to be more rewarding than sex. I mean, the World Cup only comes every four years…

Hmm…come to think of it: So do I.

And dats yDrewIS on DIS penal colony…

Like when the murderer James French was executed in the electric chair his last words were: “How about this for tomorrow’s headlines? French fries.”

I bring this up because I should be laughing hysterically right about now. But I’m not. I am laughing insanely. There is a definite edge to it. In fact, double-edged. Like my tongue.

I met a man the other day from Tucson, Arizona. We were blowing cigar smoke at one another when he let it drop that he was in Philadelphia for a couple of days to attend a highly unique seminar at the famed Hospital of University of Pennsylvania (HUP).

Jim Rocha is a quality coordinator and program director in Cardiovascular Services with that behemoth University Medical Center there in the Tucson desert.

Besides everything else, it turns out he knows my irascible cousin Burt Strug, a semi-retired thoracic surgeon, whose daughter, Keri, was the heroine gymnast of bygone Olympics.

Life has a way of bumping into the six degrees of separation.

Anyway, Jim got to jawing that a mental depression, much like Post Traumatic Stress, strikes “most everybody” who has had a serious life and death moment. A situation.  An emergency. A trauma. Including those in his cardiovascular field.

Like me, who had emergency quadruple bypass surgery. Mine was before they did quintuple bypasses, which my doc said, I needed.

Then there was my two near death-by-carbine episodes in West Africa. The first one still has me screaming and sweating long before dawn.

Then there is my younger son, being born with transposition and just about every critical malady known and unknown. It altered the dynamics, psychology, finances and entire make up of my family – until, I had no more family.

Then there is another of several episodes. Like me having to stick a screwdriver in an unusual spot in one of the trio of highwaymen who sought to permanently borrow my personal belongings when I was driving away from my son’s hospital bedside one midnight night.

Then there is my three-year-long-very-long oil project in Russia being usurped and stolen by the Putin oligarchy.

When all these and more finally added up to the wrong answer with my brain, my future ex-wife decided I wasn’t depressed, but nuts. She reads lots of psychology books without comprehension.

Hmm….Fact is, she didn’t seem to comprehend most anything.

And then, months later, when I wasn’t depressed anymore, there I was trying to un-convince the doctors I didn’t need all those pills. Which they only ceased ‘after’ my future-ex – who had caused the father of her first child, Hanz, to flee to a cave in the Palestinian West Bank; had caused her next lover to kill himself, and her third long-tryst to stay lost in a marijuana haze — tried to kill me.

She overdosed me with all those pills that the doctors finally stopped when my body stopped functioning and an emergency van rushed me to the hospital in toxic shock. It only required excessive months of recovery.

Are you getting the zebra stripes here? Why was no one listening to any voice other than Stephanie Blatt who assiduously spent her time trying to know absolutely nothing about a great many things – and succeeded very well.

But nobody listened to me when I tried to tell them that my depression was a cause and effect. That, as my new-best-friend-Jim pointed out: I was a victim of delayed mental anguish.

It was Stephanie who needed help. And I honestly wanted her to get it. But I was the only one who was seeking it for her.

But who believes the man today? Certainly not that Philadelphia Assistant District Attorney Kate Thurston. She dropped all-and-every charge against me that Steph manufactured. But only after she had no other choice but to recognize that Stephanie wasn’t only diminutive in stature, but also in character, veracity and cerebral bra-cup size — all a marked contrast to her huge mouth.

Who listens anymore to common sense?

Nobody. Because with all the lawyers and other debauched institutions we have allowed our common sense to go AWOL.

And what do we keep forgetting about those institutions? They are made up of those same geeks that were relegated to the back of the cafeteria in college. That the whole field of modern psychiatry is so experimental that only 30 years ago they still thought that homosexuality was a curable disease.

Look, pills are absolutely necessary for some people who think that when they talk to G-d it is praying. But when G-d talks to them it is schizophrenia.

But not me. Even when I tell those dour faced folks that sometimes I think I really must be G-d. Not because I’m Jewish, but because when I talk to Him I find I am talking to myself.

Look, the issue even runs to that soldier, Robert Bales, who putatively shot 16 Afghan civilians.

Bales was on his fourth tour. He didn’t feel he could do it anymore. He has been wounded twice rather seriously. And obviously the exhausted boy in this man-soldier finally snapped. It was bound to occur. He’s not the first – not in Afghanistan, Iraq or Vietnam and back in the day.

But who was listening to him?

Now they will.

Like Jim Rocha gleaned from his seminar in Philly’s HUP, which has become a leader in this field of trauma induced depression. Sooner or later the depression or trauma will strike. Maybe in a few days. Maybe in a few months. Maybe in a few years. But it will strike.

And what are we supposed to do about it?

If I may make a suggestion: I think we are supposed to use our common sense. And so are our psychiatrists, lawyers, social workers, etc. You just don’t hand out pills and deliver stigmas. The bureaucracy is fraught with too many people who were born stupid and work overtime to stay that way.

A wife, even an ex, like my Stephanie talks too much and says too little. Many of my friends who have known me over 30 years admit that her stories were compelling at first. It’s just that when she called 10 times, or faxed reams of esoteric medical stories that they became suspicious.

So why didn’t they talk to me?

Because they always thought I was a crazy guy. Yet, that’s why they liked me, isn’t it? But friends, or not, we all become disappointments to one another.

Now they’ll hear more folks like Jim Rocha speak up. And people like my friends will hang their heads and say: “We didn’t know. We didn’t realize.”

Yes they did. But like most folks they simply rather believe the worst in all of us.

And dats yDrewIS on DIS penal colony…

I had to remind myself of this last Saturday as I entered the U.S. Customs building in Philadelphia. It was the one and only weekend day of the year that passport services are conducted.

It is the way our government employees attempt to demonstrate that they certainly are here to serve us – which, of course, is reflected in their ample guaranteed wages, as well as secured benefits and perks we pay them to terrorize us when they aren’t providing services Monday thru Friday.

Anyway, since my ex-wife, Miss Stephanie Blatt, literally stole everything – including my passport – I thought I should go down and ‘just’ get another one on the one convenient day a year.

I mean, when my passport has been lost or stolen overseas I usually pop into the U.S. embassy or an expensive hotel. They look me up on the computer, ask a few personal questions to make sure I don’t have a bomb in my underwear, have me sign so little paperwork it would barely fill one of Victoria Secret’s bras, and then pay a fee that just about covers a nite in a five star hotel.

Good service doesn’t come cheap. Just ask your wife if she cooked enough for you to eat dinner, also.

Hmm…

But matters started out poorly the moment I walked into the federal stone behemoth.

The entire building was empty except for the passport office.  It was located just on the other side of the metal detector, the conveyor belt and the strip and search sector that wasn’t just for aliens and other Native Americans who foolishly allowed the white man to emigrate here. In addition there were three security guards dressed in the de guerre of black fatigues. They also possessed an assortment of menacing armaments and pistols.

The one guard, with barely horizontal slit for a mouth, wanted to know if I had any sharp objects and such. Well, I said, I’d have to look in my man-bag. But, no doubt, I did have my nail clipper, and my penknife, and if I searched deep enough I’d probably locate a nail file, my two cigar lighters, my razor sharp cigar clipper… And, I wanted to add: an anti-tank gun. But these guys had all the humor genes of a couple of Southern Baptist who refuse to acknowledge each other in a liquor store.

Hmm…

The guard said I’d have to put the objects somewhere outside the building. I responded: You mean you don’t have some plastic trays and shelves to store this stuff for an hour? Like a coat-check lady? We spend all this money on abuse with no service? Hell, I could go back home and get that.

Another guard manning the conveyor belt felt it necessary to interrupt his ennui. He said: “This is a federal building. You ought to know the rules.”

I searched his face for some form of logic, if not animal, intelligence.

I should know the rules?

“Sir,” I queried: “Do you know who won the Soccer World Cup last year? Do you know what club Tiger Woods’ wife lofted him with? Do you know the square root of Pi. Do you know where Davey Jones is interred…”

“We all know stuff,” I explained. “But you don’t know ‘that’ stuff. And I don’t know ‘this’ stuff. So why don’t we all be a little more civil ….Otherwise I might make you sleep with my ex-wife.”

Hmm…. Youse gots to talk duh language.

So after I stored my weapons of mass destruction at a coffee shop directly across the street – at no cost or inanity — I proceeded to empty my pockets, take off my belt and remove all objects they deemed undesirable before I stepped through a metal detector. They only questioned my new Kindle Fire in my black man-bag.

I should have suggested they use it to read our Bill of Rights. But I didn’t need to be a bigger wise-ass than usual.

Then I merely strolled 8 tiny steps into the customs office to be greeted by two more uniformed people with guns that looked like they could blow your ears off even if they shot you in the big toe. They directed me to step into one of the lines leading to the thick bullet-proof teller windows.

And I mean thick. Those windows were thick enough to stop a herd of amok elephants madly dashing for the maiden in heat.

Somehow it ‘just’ doesn’t look like home anymore. Why is it that the misdeeds of the very few always end up ‘unjustly’ punishing the nearly 350 million of us Americans who are ‘just’ law abiding, taxpaying citizens? When did the 99 percent ‘just’ relinquish our rights to the perverts? Are we ‘justly’ getting the government we ‘just’ don’t deserve?

The clerk spoke very well through all that plate glass deterrent to my rocket launcher that obviously wouldn’t fit in my man-bag or my pant pocket. When he queried ‘What do you need?’ I was about to respond: $10 million dollars and a one-way plane ticket to a sunny island that doesn’t require a passport. The dork probably would have sent me to Guantanamo.

What in the hell does he think I need? Am I in the passport office to find a cure for my jock rash?

Finally I pulled my mouth back over my entire head and politely explained that my passport was destroyed by the conflagration set my ex-wife. I needed another.

He looked me up on the computer the size of those flat screen TVs.

Yep, there I was. Still three years to go on my here-today-gone-with-my-ex passport book. Picture and all. I mean, my entire life’s cornucopia, vitae, history, mother’s maiden name and my-life-as-a-jerk was spread before his beady little eyes. Everything even matched the driver’s license I provided him.

“Fill out this paperwork and bring them back with some photos,” he merely said.

So I filled out the paperwork while noshing on a couple of government provided cookies overdosed with all the sugar we probably once got from Cuba. I washed them down with coffee that had all the epicurean taste of my ex.

Then I went in search of photo snappers. The closer to the customs building the higher the absurdity. Tax plus $25 for anything within a couple blocks. A little farther down I stumbled onto a Walgreens where they snapped me for 10 bucks.

Upon returning I had to repeat all the rigmarole at the security clearance station. Kept my mouth shut there. I’ve been married. I can be trained. Then I proceeded to the same passport teller and handed him my paperwork and pictures.

He looked them over and compared them to all the information on the huge flat screen computer and my lost passport. Then, after he tapped the papers down and paper-clipped them he asked: “Okay, now do you have any proof of citizenship?”

Say what?!!!…

Say WHAT?!!!…

Say what duh heck?!!!…

Where is my elephant gun when I needs it?!

With complete vexation I snorted: “You mean, like my driver’s license I gave you? My voter’s registration card I showed you? My still active passport that you have on your computer screen? Or perhaps my genital tattoo?…”

He furrowed his forehead at me through the 2-inch glass.

“Yeah. It’s for divorced guys. A society. Call ourselves DD’s.  Dead Dicks. When we walk by we shake our tattoos. Want me to demonstrate?!”

He started patronizing: “Are we having a bad day?”

We?!

I pursued some logic: “Couldn’t you just take what you need from the information on my active passport now being displayed on your computer?”

After three of these pleas of logic he exhaled. He said that would cost another $150, on top of the $135 I already owed him. Of course, he didn’t add in the pictures, the aggravation, plus my time to be there – unpaid for, unlike his.

Wait a minute! Did he just say he could get all the information, plus proof I am not the mad Arab who failed to set fire to his bomber shoes, from the computer display of my existing passport?

He stood there with an intolerant, but somewhat smug, grin. He said what he wanted was my birth certificate. He would mail me the information on how to retrieve it. It should ‘just’ take about 6 weeks.

Duh? … Did he ‘just’ say he could get everything he needed by ‘just’ referring to my existing passport in the computer ‘just’ 8 inches from his eyeballs and ‘just’ 18 inches on the other side of me through this 2-inch bullet proof glass?

Did he?

A misologist is an idiot that absolutely hates all logic and reasoning. A dead misologist means he finally got the Big Picture — one down, but 16 million still to go… As always

And dats yDrewIS on DIS penal colony…

About 20 minutes later he did it again. I didn’t know what he was aiming to shoot. Without a moon there was nothing much to see. And I was beginning to think he was acting crazier than a blind man in a gun fight.

It was a tad unnerving. Afterall, I was young enough to still be struggling with my alphabet soup. With the night watchman off for a few days, my dear ol’ Pappy and I were walking the fence lines of the 400-acre farm and around the boundaries of his chain saw factory that someone had once set ablaze a couple years back.

And just after he fired that roaring semi-automatic cannon one more time, I screeched out: What are you doing that for?!

“Just sending a message, son,” he exhaled at the end of a long omnipotent puff on his omniscient corn cob pipe. “Just letting any trespassers know that their warning shots have already been fired.”

I grew up fully endowed in the many versions of what my dear ol’ Pappy and others meant by ‘warning shots.’  As in, No Trespassing: Any survivors will be executed.

“Man’s gotta hold himself accountable,” I remember Dad espousing as we ambled on. “You pay a price for everything. Most folks don’t consider warnings.”

At that my dear ol’ Pappy spit a wad of that tobacco pipe juice before adding: “Most folks don’t consider most anything – even the good Lord’s commandments.”

Hmmm…

Bourbon sippin’, pipe puffin’ and most everything else, my Dad wasn’t one to much like people. But he was one to prepare so he could be the last man standing to deliver the final acerbic words at their funerals.

“We are all fools,” he said. “We are all born to die. In many ways, at any time. And when it’s my time I don’t want to be caught with my pants snagged in a barb-wire fence.”

Like most of us.

Which we demonstrated, recently, with ‘Hurricane Irene.’

In the Philadelphia metropolitan area, the hurricane dominatrix was sorely as disappointing as my hungover face in the morning mirror. After all the bloody hype and unending operatic warnings, we still got painfully snagged in our pants’ zippers.

By that, I mean, we believed the same TV people who cried ‘Wolf!’ the last time. And the time before that. And the time before… and before… But never a time without all those prime time paying commercials.

Indeed a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

I thought we were going to act like we all got a proctologist to pull out our heads into the light of reason and rationale.  And we seemed to be making some good headway, at first.

That is until Irene got huffing and puffing. Then the shills and shrills took our over spineless souls.

We were told the bawdy belle might do something terribly dreadful — like knock out our $150 a month TV cables . So finally, like locusts, we swarmed our food and hardware stores, where hiked prices on batteries and stuff sent the Dow Jones all giddy.

All the screaming, agonizing, kvetching and whining from the TV news and politicians and weather channels almost made me yearn for my ex-wife.

How many times did we need to be told that Big Bad Bart was sending in his bigger, uglier, sister, Irene, over inoculated with PMS and a supertanker of testosterone ?

Back in the days my parents struggled in the Great Depression, it seemed that folks had little and were constantly preparing for less. A lesson they always carted with them.

I mean, after the chain saw factory burned down when the Modena Fire Trucks ran out of water, my father dug two fire ponds. When the Americans and Russians were nuclear saber rattling back in the early 60s, my father built a bomb shelter in the basement. We were always stacking up extra supplies for the winter surprises. When wild dogs strode in to kill our sheep we had already stocked up extra bullets to keep the peace.

There was always something to prepare for, especially the wrath of my ideological Pappy.

In my parents time they learned you couldn’t depend on the government for sufficient answers. You went out and supplied them yourself. You shoveled the snow and picked up the litter. You looked in on your neighbors. Everyone had responsibilities, even if it was little more than courteously tipping your hat to an aging war widow.

Today it is easier than at any time in the last 10,000 years to prepare for that which can possibly be prepared for.

So what happened again? Why did the last minute lines grow so rambunctious, again. And for what unG-dly reason were folks gripped with fear?

I guess, like my dear ol’ Pappy, I am shooting in the dark here. A word to the wise ain’t necessary. It’s us stupid folks that need the ‘advice.’ The ones who merely use our intelligence to invent stupidity.

Born stupid and work overtime to stay that way. And you wonder why I’ve had so many relationships. By the way, they were all successful….in that they ALL ended.

It is fine that our government finally did something right this time. It actually warned us about the hurricane of the century – even if ‘The Perfect Irene,’ turned out to be that oxymoron — a reasonable woman.

Except for some flooding and power outages she was far less destructive than Florida stealing Bush’s first election away from Gore.

Oy-vey!

In the end, hurricane Irene, turned out to be like most of my exes, mostly churlish fury, lingering where it wasn’t wanted, far too long. Yet you have to ask yourself why we always seem readily able to be ‘sold’ on the worst case scenario.

On TV there is the weather channel, followed by all the local and cable news channels getting weather reports from the same source — National Weather Service. This is 24/7 of weather. We had something like that when I was growing up nearly 50 years ago. We called it a window.

What we seem to forget is that since the anointing of the so-called ‘Perfect Storm’ and the ‘storm of the century’ nothing is what it is anymore. It now must always set a record. It now must beat out all previous storms…

Or be a disappointment.

It must be hyped, screamed, dared to be greater than ever.

And we have become accustomed to this, in our sports, for instance, as well as Wall Street, the revenues harvested by last weekend’s Hollywood release… and most everything else.

Now we want this weather to beat all other recorded weather. It is good for business. The news business. The grocery store business. The hardware store business…

They’ve got us screaming and crying and stomping our feet about everything. And I find it exhausting. And it’s made me understand all this escapism we undergo – especially in watching all those stupid shows on TV.

Perhaps it is because I am aging petulantly, but there are too many crises than can fit on the 500 cable channels. There cannot be any more crises next week. My schedule is already full.

I guess what I am saying is that even the most dim wittiest who walk among us and do little more than overfill our sewer pipes will eventually catch the disease of the inured, fed-up, sick-and-tired and I ain’t taking it no more.

And when folks stop believing and listening to anything and everything the government or news or movies are hyping — whether it is cheap homes and overpriced mortgages to the next storm of the century — then you have something much uglier than the hairy wart on your fat aunt’s derriere.

Without ‘faith’ we stop believing in all the lies we are told. We believe them now because they keep our way of life afloat – like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the value of the dollar, and the loopholes in the Bible.

Look. As with anything, I appreciate being warned. That’s the government’s job – warn, but not dictate. And if need be, warn me again. And then tell me what you already warned me about.

That’s three and out.

And if I choose to disregard them, don’t resuscitate me. Don’t rescue this stupid ol’ boy. We all deserve to die for our stupidity and insolence. For the most part we dig our own graves.

Like my dear ol’ Pappy informed me: The warning shots were fired. Trespassers were warned. All survivors will be executed.

There’s no better advice than a good scare. And nothing focuses the mind like a good hanging.

And dats yDrewIS on DIS penal colony.