At the age of 25, I wrote a series of stories for a small newspaper in Sandusky, Ohio, headlined Hunger and Hope, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and landed me a dinner seat between Dan Rather and Annie Lebovitz. After a bathroom break, I ran into the event’s host, the lovely and elegant Ethel Kennedy, who I was delighted to chat with for a few minutes.
After our conversation, I turned to see the tail of my white starched shirt sticking out of my fly. Way out and at an inappropriate angle. To her credit and my everlasting respect, Ethel never cracked a smile during our five minutes talking intellectly together.
At the start of four decades of award-winning journalism, she was the first to teach me grace at the intersection of the comic and tragic.
With the launch of my blog, I continue to be drawn to places that make me ask - Is there any possibility for redemption?
Our world on fire, seeing the President of the United States teetering on the edge of the White House lawn is like watching Wile E. Coyote fall from a cliff, Portia’s calm and mad pursuit, or Quixote and his ass off to fight imaginary enemies.
And that’s to say nothing of the other old demented orange man with 88 felony counts and too many mental illnesses to number.
How does anyone, left or right, place their hope in politics?
Against a widening gyre of division and hate, we fabricate, then bifurcate, foes into tribes of right and wrong. — liberals fondness for baby blood, and the conservative obsession with M&M genitals, to name a few. In either case, not a real thing — a pedophile-vampire Democrat or a M&M genital. Split into opposing camps, we fight each other because it’s easier than working together on some real and pressing problems — climate change, concentration of wealth, gun violence, a nation filled with rage splitting at the seams..
Don’t get me wrong. As a comic writer, I am forever grateful for our age of ripe irony. Even with a million stoned monkeys typing on a million typewriters for the rest of eternity, you couldn’t make this shit up. In my way of thinking, if you intend to self destruct a living planet, the best coping strategy is to go down in fits of delusional laughter. I promise to do my best to contribute to such a noble cause.
Mostly, I write because I have no choice. It’s a question of survival. Each day, I wrestle with monkeys in my mind, a metaphor I use to describe life with mental illness, mostly anxiety and depression. A child of fundamentalism, a born cynic testing as an idealist, I offer a smorgasbord of obsessions, phobias, and other dysfunctions, small servings from a large number of menu entrees. If I do not create, I sink in despair. When the global pandemic hit, imagine the rabid nature of my monkeys since.
Slipping unnoticed under Sauron’s eye of power, Frodo and Sam, halflings from the Shire, with a good deal of help on the way, manage to carry the One Ring to Mount Doom where it is destroyed.
A fool’s hope impossibly realized. Those are the everyday, ordinary, slice-of-life stories I am drawn to tell — against-all-odds redemption born from the union of the tragic and comic.