YES, IT’S ALL A FREAK SHOW, INDEED* I can well believe it takes all the air out of the room. I didn't watch Frontline’s Charlottesville** documentary though. I know what happened, basically, and may see it someday. I'm very happy it's televised and available. Right now though, it's all too real and near and possible. I need the mental cushion of just knowing, and not looking. I well know what it looks like already. As did many of my relatives back in and around The Pale, who didn't live to speak of it, and I've lived the entire silence about the subject with an extended family for 60-plus years. It's too loud a devastating subject to ever even whisper about. What are ya gonna do? Anyway? Well, I could join my son, wonderful young man now of dual American-Canadian citizenship living in B.C. It's tempting. I'd love to live near him anyway! Go Northwest, old man, I hear myself think at times. I have felt the strong presence all along, from childhood, riding along with me on a continuum where the past is still happening in its original form, as well as in newer different forms with different victims and different perpetrators, and have followed its course, surfacing here and there, the evil of Rwanda being a signifying manifestation, for instance, Columbine, for another, knowingly perpetrated on Hitler's birthday, subscribing for years to the Southern Poverty Law newsletter which recounts all reported hate crimes in the U.S. in climbing monthly totals into the dozens per month after month and rising with a bullet, with accounts of the crimes and those committing them and why. You don't have to look far or long. You can scan the headlines every single day. It's too easy. What's hard is to block it out. It's amazing how many people do, for different reasons. Two of them: Because it could never happen to me. Because it could happen to me. You're both wrong! It's happening now, somewhere, all the time. The fuse is lit. The race is on and here comes heartache. And now that "it" has the American presidential and one major party’s personal approving imprimaturs on it, with no American institution yet proving capable of seriously restraining it or cutting its power off at the knees with one swoop of the sword of justice, I think it's okay to begin to feel, or anticipate the beginning of feeling of...It. Is. Happening. Here. And yes…It. Can. Still. Be. Deterred. But it's easily as likely that it won't be. Already it's underway, with the easiest victims first to be demonized, officially denounced (yes, that is key), and gotten rid of like slaves at auction, with their prospects torn limb from limb as if by wolf packs, if not brutally imprisoned. Yes, not too cheery lately. I’ve even felt the need to reach back eight years for an upbeat song to record, just to feel like I'm doing something positive, that something's worth doing, and hopefully to soon send it out into a cold perplexed confused world that's looking for some warmth and clarity. I'll keep my warmth, thank you, until 'it' pries it from my cold dead body, but the world should have my clarity. It’s refreshing, and terrifying. With this song maybe I'll finally make a buck out of art! Or at least out of music. It'd be nice to be rewarded for my long harrowing doctor-it's-my-eyes personal monitoring of what's now emerged right from under our own 600 million feet**, and my musical response to it. It'd be almost cleansing, so to speak, though not ethnically. It’s easy to get lost in such a big parade*** * Title borrowed from Liz. ** Other potential and real documentaries among a galaxy of possibilities: Andersonville Georgia (not far from Plains) 13000 murdered, Sharpeville Transvaal South Africa 69 murdered, El Mozote El Salvador 800 murdered, Kigali Rwanda up to a million murdered, Srebenica Bosnia 8000 murdered). And the beat goes on. Drums keep pounding rhythm to the brain. Maybe Cher can still do something. Sonny Bono wrote a hell of a good song, ya know? Distracted yet? *** Actual carnage may vary.