I was going to write you a letter about how we’d grown old together; 21 years! We could legally have a drink.
But as I sat down to write this, I realized that I no longer think of you as just a brother.
When we met, I was 35, you 21. A generation apart, but close enough that we could have overlapped social circles, maybe come to recognize each other by name. Shake hands. Hug.
But on this date 21 years ago, you stopped aging. I stagger on: 55 now and still a scientific marvel. My body tumbles now and again, but you haven’t missed a beat. Our antigens must have fit like corner jigsaw pieces; even doctors shake their heads at our endurance.
And as we march onward, I see our roles differently. I see you now as a young recruit drafted unwillingly into the Great Gurney War. I see myself as a jaded sergeant who enlisted because he could see no other future. And when you fell, I affixed your bayonet to my rifle.
So now I wear your kidney and pancreas like dog tags, and keep them not around my neck, but deep within, just around my left rib cage. I plan to lay them as high atop Antigen Hill and my legs will carry.
I don’t know the people who were blessed by your heart, or lungs, or liver. But I do know that no one guards you more fiercely than I. For all the threats that have surrounded us — viruses, infections, maskless and careless idiots — we have held the bunker. For more than two decades!
I know men about my age who have sons about your age. My oldest friend was born a week from me. His youngest son is about to turn 21.
I could be that man.
You could be that boy.
Samuel, my boy.
I’m not going to lie; snipers still abound. COVID looms like a shroud, gray as uncertainty.
The cavalry is on the way, we’re told, but we must patrol this front on our own until support gets here.
So I’ve got a plan. I adopted a dog you’d love, a happy and huge chocolate Labrador named J.D.
You create a distraction by feeding her slowly (she’ll bark her head off at that, but don’t worry; she’s all love and newness).
I’ve never owned one, and only met them at dog parks. I met one so handsome and Paul-Newman-blue-eyed I told the owner it may have been the most beautiful animal I’d ever met. He said thanks, but that he was just the walker. He said the dog had its own agent, it was booked for so many commercials and magazine shoots.
I don’t give a shit about magazine covers, but I gotta admit: I’ve always loved horsedogs. In truth, my Walter Mitty existence involves owning a horse. But let’s be real; I’m no cowboy.
I am, however, a dogboy. And the bigger the better. Teddy tipped the scales at 75 pounds, Larry 80. Now I’m flirting with the idea of a single dog that outweighs them both.
I’m not sure why I’m drawn to such an enterprise, because every column and YouTube video I’ve watched warns: Be prepared to do the work. There’s no short-changing training or attention with a Dane.
Perhaps that’s the appeal. I once knew a 120-pound Detroit Rottweiler, a frightening site to behold. She looked like she’s have you for an appetizer, but she was all softie. And when a 120-pounder splays on you, it’s a lovegasm, plain and simple.
I think I want that again. I’m not one with the natural world; I don’t commune or meditate or chant a mantra. Your cosmic unity will always sound like a horoscope to me.
But maybe I find the world through dogs. I know this is parental dementia, but a dog’s breath to me must smell like what baby’s breath smells like to a mother. I don’t engage in dog speak, but that’s only because I think it demeans both parties. But if I could get through, I’d bark over talking.
I know this instinct would cost, literally and figuratively. I would want insurance. Dog food would cost some people’s rent. Shit would drop like a Trump rally.
And still…
I’ve never had a parenting urge. But this desire to bring a wolf to guard my campfire is primal.
If a dog is my entree to the universe, maybe it should be soul that blows the goddamn doors off.
There’s a terrific contrivance in Blade Runner 2049. The 2017 Blade Runner sequel posits that there was an epic blackout of electricity in 2022 that made it impossible to tell human beings from their synthetic counterparts, Replicants.
What a prescient notion.
For today, Tuesday, June 16, 2020, we experienced a tragic, heretofore unnoticed, blackout across the news landscape.
Only the day before, a Republican-run Supreme Court voted 6-3 (a near-unanimous vote in today’s politically bipolar times) that the 1964 Civil Rights Act extends to gay, lesbian, and transgender employees from discrimination based on sex. On top of that, Trump’s first appointee to the court, Neil Gorsuch, wrote the majority opinion.
When the news broke, it thundered and properly shook homes in all news neighborhoods, from print to TV to online. It was at least a 7.0 Richter scale rumbler, and was properly compared to the Civil Rights and Women’s Rights victories of the 1960’s.
So why the hell did we not treat it that way the next day?
After reading about the news yesterday afternoon, I immediately tuned to the 24/7s. There, from CNN to FOX to MSNBC, I found nothing but protest and pandemic news. Some to applaud mask-wearers and sign-holders, some to condemn them.
On the late-night circuit, the ruling took a backseat to the shows’ cold-open toppers: Trump geezer-stepping down the ramp at West Point.
This isn’t to say that those stories aren’t news. Both pandemic and protest deserve front-page coverage. The New York Times noted that Trump’s physical frailty, from his arm spasms to slurred words to geriatric gait, could be personal trouble for the president and political trouble for his party.
But take a look at the picture atop this post. It’s a screenshot of the Apple News feed from this morning recapping the most important events of the day. A next day.
You will find nothing there about the ruling.
If what happened yesterday was the tectonic shift all outlets claimed, how could that news not merit remaining a top-of-the-fold, lead-the-newscast, editor’s-pick story today? Did we cover passage of the Civil Rights Act with the same short-term memory?
I pray not, and I suspect not.
I get the demands on news that it be clock-current in coverage. We will once think it quaint that we got our news on parchment a day after an event. Now we want a full-blown analysis of the game we just watched waiting for us by the time we get to our phone or computer.
But there is a darker truth about the way we covered the ruling — and news writ large. We largely ignored it because it was good news (at least for those who agreed with the ruling, which is likely a vast majority, given the judicial panel speaking).
That truth becomes undeniably clear when you think of how this story could have been written today. Where are the pieces on joyous reactions of Americans who finally feel recognized? Where’s the story on a worker relieved that she won’t be fired for joining her gay softball team? Those would make for fine TV/online/print/social media articles.
There are also complex news stories to pursue. On Friday, for instance, the Trump Administration finalized erasing Obama-era transgender civil rights protections in health care. The Times noted that Friday’s ruling meant that the Department of Health and Human Services no longer had to recognize gender identity as an avenue for sex discrimination in health care.
Given their leanings, you’d think CNN and MSNBC, at the very least, would be all over this troubling news for the administration, particularly with a presidential election a few months away. Or that FOX would be lamenting the snowflaking of a Supreme Court it once considered it’s literal Trump card. Gorsuch was supposed to be a puppet. Is this dissent in the cult?
Speaking of the Supremes: What does this mean for civil rights, which will inevitably be in the Court’s cross hairs, given the tumult that has followed the George Floyd death and ascending Black Lives Matter movement.
Maybe these stories are being aired. But I need prospector’s luck finding them.
You’d think the story would have gotten more traction simply because it is a new beat in the two-note symphony that has become news.
Perhaps part of the problem was that the initial stories mislead readers. The truth is that the ruling is not on a scale of the Civil Rights and Women’s Rights breakthroughs because it involves fewer people.
It’s important news, to be sure. But it should be put in context, which is that the LGBTQ ruling may have been as big as its predecessor, but the monster wave was in a smaller ocean. Maybe even a lake superior.
This is how news became a Labrador puppy, blindly leaping to get out from under the blanket we call Fake News.
That news, too, should be put in context. We know the cliche If it bleeds, it leads.
