Sabotaged by Amazon

Last week, I paid Amazon $20.95 to send me 100 teabags of lapsang souchong tea. The brand was the British company, Taylors of Harrogate (“since 1886“).

Instead, Amazon sent me two 14 x 2 inch floor registers from Rocky Mountain Goods. I have no use for such things and I immediately went on the Amazon website to try to inform them of their mistake. But the process of pointing out the problem and then returning the bulky registers was so complicated that I never got to connect with the Amazon return process.

And so now I sit here with two floor registers I have no use for and without the special tea bags I do have a use for. I have been sabotaged by Amazon. The world of digital, online, no-face-to-face, personal business exchange has shown once again that today’s world of human vs. computer interaction is cold-blooded and slow to admit mistakes..

This would never happen if there were a tea shop nearby that carried Taylors’ lapsang souchong in tea bags. But I haven’t found one. The shops sell other kinds of Taylors tea, but not their lapsang.

The good news is that I already have a good supply of Twinings lapsang teabags in my cupboard, as well as a half-ounce of loose lapsang from Willoughby’s. But I like the Taylors’ version as a backup.

Still, compared to the Ukraine-Russian war or the earthquake in Turkey and Syria, this is a mosquito bite. I had a pot of lapsang for breakfast this morning and will have another pot again tomorrow morning. I am not deprived. I still live a privileged life.

And $20 is not worth my spending another five minutes trying to straighten things out with Amazon. A behemoth like Amazon has no time for beach pebbles like me.

But once upon a time, when we in the world did most of our business face to face, and people behaved in three dimensions, and you looked the salesperson in the eye, and if you had a problem, that person could fix it in a minute — back then, you felt an identity in the buying and the selling. Somebody you could look at would sell you something you could put in your car. Coming and going had texture, personality, three-dimensions. You could talk to somebody who would listen. You could smile back and forth and say ‘Thank you.’

There are still places like that. But fewer and fewer customers are showing up. Bed, Bath and Beyond is going out of business, thanks to Amazon. Radio Shack disappeared. Have you been to a Sears and Roebuck lately?

We hate human touch so much nowadays that we spend most of our time on Smart Phones living life by hear-say. And now Artificial Intelligence (AI) will complete the job, by doing our thinking and talking and buying for us. We will trade in our free will for the speed and efficiency of the highest-tech possible. We will avoid the messiness of touch and the inefficiency of time.

We will protect ourselves from global warming by declaring hands-on businesses to be enemies of the people.

Only the destitute will be allowed to pay cash. They will shop in slums overseen by convicts. Their tea will be made from eel grass. Their bread will contain tranquilizers.

The Fence

And then there was that day in the backyard. I was maybe five. Maybe six. We lived in the city in a brick apartment house. On the second floor.

My ‘father,’ who was not a father but a sperm provider, although he gave me his last name, which I would abandon as soon as my mother and I left to live with my grandparents. I remember nothing about him, except he was drunk a lot and beat my mother.

He was also a reporter for the local morning paper. He covered the crime beat. I have no memory of his voice or of his touch. I suspect he never talked to me, never touched me.

What I most remember is the sunny afternoon, when my mother was ironing clothes in the living room. I was standing on the couch. He came in, hit my mother in the face. She fell against the ironing board and then collapsed on the floor. She crawled over to me and wrapped her arms around me.

After that, she and I left and lived for four years with my grandparents.

But before we left, there was that day in the backyard.

I was throwing stones over a tall fence that defined the end of the yard. On the other side, was an open field, and at the other end of that field was the Winchester Firearms Company. They made “The Rifle That Won The West.”

I often threw small stones over that fence. But on this one particular day, when I threw a stone over the fence, a voice shouted, “Hey!”

I froze. I never imagined that someone would be on the other side of the fence. I always thought it was just an open field over there. And it was. But now suddenly there was someone in that open field and maybe I hit him with my stone. Or maybe my stone just landed near him. But he knew a stone had been thrown and he knew where it had come from.

What if he came looking for me? What if I got into trouble?

I ran to the corner of the fence where it bordered against the yard next door. There was a knothole in the fence, which I often looked through. That’s how I knew it was an open field on the other side.

I quietly walked over to the knothole and pressed my eye up against it. AND THERE WAS ANOTHER EYE LOOKING AT ME THROUGH THE HOLE !

I yelled and turned and ran back to our house. My heart was beating like crazy.

I never threw another stone over that fence. And I never told my mother about it, let alone my sperm provider.

And then after awhile, my mother and I left. And time passed. A lot of time. And a lot of other things happened. And people grew up and people died and I went here and I went there and I did this and I did that.

And eighty years later, I now live in an apartment that is a three-minute drive from that brick building and that tall fence.

Winchester no longer exists, nor does the rifle that won the West. America now has more guns than it has people. And the West has been lost to more violence than it can handle.

As for me, the only stones I throw now are those I fling into the sea. And they disappear without a sound like after-thoughts in a one-way conversation.

The Boy With The Regrettable Secrets

Liberals want to crucify him. He likes guns and had 50 online friends who also like guns. And sometimes a racist remark was made by someone in the group, though I haven’t seen any such evidence. But it is mentioned in articles about him.

What is racist nowadays? The Atlanta Braves? The Cleveland Indians?

Some Republicans give him mealy-mouthed support by blaming Liberals for highlighting his conservative slant on things. One crazy Republican calls him a “hero.”

He is not a hero. He is a 21-year-old young man who seems more like 18. He lives at home with his mother, his step-father, and the family’s two dogs. He has lived his whole life in a small town in Massachusetts. He graduated from high school three years ago and right away joined the Air National Guard.

I graduated from high school when I was 18 and right away joined the U.S. Army and served three years of active duty.

But I did not steal secret documents and send them to my on-line friends. There were no such things as on-line friends when I was in the Army. There was no internet, no digital anything, no cell phones, no on-line ideas, no digital world. We had television and telephones that plugged into the wall. We had AM radio and long-playing records. And we had books we held in our hands and movies we went to every Friday or Saturday night at the movie theater. And later we had cassette tapes.

But we did not have passwords for getting into secret places. We did not have machines that could penetrate Pentagon mysteries from our kitchen table.

Now that we have all that new stuff, we can get ourselves into serious trouble we can’t even imagine. Or if we can imagine it, we think we can hide inside all the digital make-believe.

And yet, we still have young men who are just boys the way they used to be, years ago, with more responsibility than they can understand or handle.

Boys who want to be Someone. Who want to show off. Who want to impress their friends. Who don’t want to admit that they still live at home with their mother. Boys who have always liked to tell secrets.

He was not a whistle-blower. He was not trying to undermine or embarrass the government. He was not like Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning. He was just a young man without a lot of friends in North Dighton, Massachusetts. And then he found himself in the Air National Guard with a secret clearance that was as common as an ice cream cone, And now he suddenly had long-distance friends on the internet that he never met face-to-face but that looked up to him as a kind of leader who knew what he was talking about and had secrets to back it up.

And one things led to another. And now his life is ruined. And people want to put him in prison for a long time.

But he never meant to do anything bad. He just thought that showing his friends secret papers would mean they’d be impressed with him and would think he was quite a guy.

He is one of the small people in the world wrecked by the temptations of the digital universe and crushed by his lonely wish to have friends he could only meet in a two-dimensional forever land.

He won’t even have his two dogs with him in prison.

He won’t even have a computer. He won’t have anything, except nighttimes of sadness and regret and a loneliness fed by an almost bottomless remorse.

Show him some mercy. Tell him he’s not as terrible as the government says he is.

Tell him he was just stupid.

And that stupid people will always have a place in the world.

A Lonely Gull

I was sitting behind the brambles at Lighthouse Point a couple of days ago. The sun was shining but the wind out of the southwest was chilly and the brambles were just thick enough to cut down on the force of the wind. And so I sat there, instead of under the black cherry tree, which I would have preferred , but which was too exposed for comfort.

The brambles are still thin this time of year. The leaves haven’t come out yet. But the many branches still provide some protection. And so I sat there by myself and still had an open view of the two lighthouses and the sea and the distant breakwater barriers.

I had no reason to be there, except to just be there. To just to sit in my folding Pico chair and look and listen and to feel yet again what it’s like to watch the sea and listen to the slap of the tide against the rocks and to watch the sea birds negotiate with the wind and the dogs walk by with their human companions and to take in what life is like when there are no streets and buildings to cramp nature’s style, and the tide rises and falls regardless of what humans may have in mind.

And then a lone seagull landed in the grass about 80 feet away. He was gray and speckled, not the white kind you normally see around the coast. He folded his wings and tucked his legs under his body and sat like a pillow in the grass, maybe10 feet near the path that people take when they walk around this section of the Point.

And there he sat, unmoving, as people passed by and dogs looked briefly at him and nobody came to sit on the bench that was just to his left. Nobody paid him any attention at all, which I suppose was a good thing. And there he just sat. Five minutes, ten minutes, 15, 20 minutes. Just in the grass, where people walked by.

I began to feel concerned. Was he injured? Was he just able to fly to where he was but didn’t have the strength or the wing power to leave? And if he was injured, what could I do about it? Wildlife rehabilitators generally don’t help wild birds, especially seagulls. They may help yard birds like robins or blue jays, but even then they’re reluctant to intervene. And they seldom, if ever, treat gulls.

So what good could I do, if he was injured? I took a couple of telephoto camera shots of him, as he just sat there. But I couldn’t see any useful details.

And then, he stood up, unfolded his large wings and took off. Thank god, I thought. He’s ok. He can fly.

Maybe he just wanted company. Maybe he just wanted to be near people or maybe he was hoping another gull would come down and be his friend. I imagine birds get lonely too. They watch us as much if not more than we watch them. There’s a kind of distant recognition of one species for another. We are not alone, even if sometimes we feel we are completely abandoned. There is always someone nearby, with or without wings, with or without feathers, with or without fur.

After awhile, it was time for me to pack up and head home. I buttoned down my photo bag, folded up my chair and headed back to my car and stashed all my gear and sat in the driver’s seat ready to start the engine.

And then suddenly, a regular, white-feathered gull flew down and sat in the grass about 20 feet from my car. I didn’t think much of it. Regular gulls show up all the time. I was making some notes in my notebook, when I looked up and here came the dark, speckled gull I had been watching for the past half-hour. He landed about four feet from the white gull and settled down, as if glad to have someone he could sit next to. Someone perhaps he could pal around with, someone to help him feel less alone.

But the while-feathered gull didn’t like it. He started jerking his head around and feeling uncomfortable and took a couple of steps away from the dark-speckled gull. And then he took off, leaving the dark-speckled gull alone. Again. The way he had been alone for the past half-hour. Maybe for the past day or two. Maybe for longer than that.

I stayed in the car for awhile and watched him. He just sat there. No other gulls stopped by. He didn’t seem to have any place he was eager to get to. Eventually, he would have to find something to eat. Maybe a fish. Maybe a leftover pizza in a parking lot. Maybe he would just skip a meal and sit in the grass for awhile.

It would be night in a few hours. When it’s dark, it’s harder to tell whether you’re alone or whether you just can’t see the friend you’d like to think is nearby.

I drove out of the parking lot and made my way home. The next day would be Easter. I would have dinner with my cousins and their spouses and their 94-year-old mother. We would drink wine and talk and laugh and eat delicious food and tell stories into the early-evening.

And then would come Monday.

Trump Is Not The Main Problem

It’s not Donald Trump I fear. He will come and go like all the other crooks and gandy dancers and sleight-of-hand blowhards who have come and gone throughout American history.

He’s just the latest and most media savvy P.T. Barnum-type cartoon currently transfixing the media.

No, it’s the rubes who so passionately follow him that are the problem. They and the cynical politicians and lawyers and media conglomerates and foreign enemies who use Trump as their entry into chaos. Those people are the real danger.

The more chaos, the better for them.

Chaos comes before the takeover of the culture which, in turn, leads to the takeover of the country.

Barnum famously hung a sign in his celebrated museum, that read, “To the Egress,” which visitors followed until they discovered they were outside and had to pay a second time to get back in.

Today, the rubes are happy to chip in to Trump’s repeated requests for millions of dollars to fend off the liberal attacks. His Mara-a -Lago estate glistens from all the financial tributes paid to him by his faithful cheerleaders.

They proudly wear their MAGA hats as if wearing a knight’s tribute. They grip their guns like recruits ready to assault the Bunker Hill of their dreams. They live in feverish expectations of political sanctimony.

They go to church and thank god for this man who cheats on his wife and pays off whores to be quiet. They condemn books that tell the truth about slavery and punish teenagers who wonder whether sexual identity is always clear cut.

They pick on Jews and black and brown people because those people are always convenient targets. They see hate as a gift from an Old Testament God who never believed that bullshit about forgiving your neighbor.

They think that Putin has the right idea and that democracy has gone too far and needs to be shut down.

They think that conspiracies pedaled on social media is god talking to the faithful and that Democrats are killing babies and eating their bodies.

And all this phony legal business indicting Trump in New York is just more liberal corruption and will be dismissed once Trump gets a chance to tell his side of the story.

And when Trump is finally gone, there will always be someone else in the wings ready to step forward and get America back on the right track.

The rubes have never felt such power before and they’re not about to give it up without a fight — even a civil war, if it comes to that. And they’ve got the guns to back it up.

Thank god for the Right Wing, they say. Without it, the country would continue to slide downhill into the swamp of competing ideas and social contracts.

But the Right Wing will clean up all that debris and finally provide a single Truth that all Americans can march to — in single file, eyes straight ahead.

And No Talking !