The Beginning of the End (Again...)

Part 1. Tell the truth, Dennis

Is this the beginning of the end? That is a question we may ask ourselves in the years to come. When did it all go wrong? When did the whole world go crazy?

Who is responsible for all this fuckery?

Was it when they shut down the world for a few months in 2020? Wasn’t that a simpler time, when the world was suddenly quiet. If that wasn’t the start of this crazy time, then it sure was an accelerant. I remember being asked to remove all my clothes at the door, said clothes going immediately into the washer, my naked body going immediately into the shower, needing to sterilize myself before entering the apartment, before joining the on going discussion that my wife and daughter were having prior to my return from work, me working because my job was deemed essential, my not being allowed to work from home, as many others had been ordered to do, washing, washing, endlessly washing. We even washed the cans of food before putting them away.

These memories are only a mere two years old but branded in my brain, the reverberations even now still echo.

Is this the beginning of the end, I pondered a few days back, no time to complete my thoughts as duty called. Duty is what I call the place where I go five days a week, accepting small compensation for time rendered, money that pays the mortgage, buys food, and other simple pleasures. I digress, but isn’t that the story of my life.

Not “I confess”, but I digress.

This morning at the crack of dawn, instead of exercising, I am stuck on the memory of one of my closest friends, Lenore Herb, who was taken from us by the cruelty of cancer, pancreatic cancer, one of the most incurable cancers. She had been complaining of pain for some time, but complaining in Lenore’s world was almost an art form.

She tried self medication with marijuana and a hot water bottle, finally going to emergency, where they discovered the cancer, now stage 4. She asked the doctors what her treatment plans would be.

She was directed by the doctors to consider her spiritual options.

Consider your spiritual options. Think about those particular words.

If there ever was a better way of telling someone you were going to die, I’ve not heard it yet. When we say consider your spiritual options, does that trigger thoughts and prayers? We all know we are to die, but being told to consider your spiritual options is saying that your end is now beginning.

Hope?

Nope.

Hot water bottle and dope?

Nope.

I was busy working those last days of her life, barely two months, but I saw her when I was in town. I visited her in the hospital, where she had placed xeroxes of her beloved bill bissett’s art on the wall. Lenore was able in a few minutes to show me how to view bill’s art, to really see into the soul of his work. It was a revelation.

Lenore was a video artist who went under the name Doreen Grey, a feminist appropriation of Dorian Gray, the character who epitomizes our obsessions with youth. Dorian Gray was created by Oscar Wilde, the man who famously said, "America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilisation in between."

One time Lenore and I sat and watched the old black and white version of Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde, a movie that Lenore herself identified with. She could go from hot to cold, a trait shared by many women in my life. But she was always Lenore. They definitely broke the mold when they made her. We went out that day for fish and chips, and sat in the park, Lenore introducing me to the pleasures of having a curry sauce with my fish and chips.

I was then away for a little over a week at various trade shows, and came back to find that she was in a hospice, and her death was imminent.

We gathered around her bed in the hospice room, her daughter, her friends Maria and Danice, and me. Poor Lenore was barely breathing, her body shrivelled to literally skin and bones. Her eyes were closed and she was barely breathing, when all of a sudden she somehow sat up and pointed at Danice, saying “ Tell the truth Danice. Tell the truth.” Then she fell back, head to pillow, closed her eyes and continued her consideration of her spiritual options.

Poor Danice. It could have easily been Dennis, the names Dennis and Denise or Danice indiscriminately interchanged in growing up, people misspelling or mispronouncing my name. Lenore always shortened my name to my nickname Dense, a moniker I acquired in the days of AKA, I think from AlexVarty.

That was twelve years ago, and seems like yesterday.

When I started writing this post two days ago, it was more about the decline of civility, and how we are navigating these end times, for surely we can agree these are end times. Or can we agree?

If this is the end, when did the end start? When did the beginning of the end start? Some say it was that morning in November in 2016, when we woke to find Donald Trump as the new President. What we previously thought was improbable, was now not only possible, but fact.

Even Donald Trump was shocked by his win, never believing his con would hold. But when it did, when the floodgates of hell and hate, and repressed rage gushed forward, it didn’t just seep from the remote edges to the centre, slowly darkening the entire picture, until our disbelief became our disability. No, gush it did, unleashing a raving and ravaging unraveling.

Every day brought a new horror, a dismantling of our carefully constructed false reality. You could see it coming in slo-motion, these seeds of Trumpism, planted by Clinton, not Hilary, but that other Clinton, Loose Willie, his oily southern embouchure blowing on the saxophone as he graced the late night show with Arsenio Hall.

Do you remember that little elf -like voice of Ross Perot as he warned us? If we elected a Clinton or a Bush, all that we would hear would be the giant sucking sound of all the jobs going south to Mexico, forever gone. Perot saw the future and told the truth. He could see the elephant in the room, the emperor’s new clothes, the answer blowing in the wind, like the air punched out of a sex doll.

But was that the beginning of the end? The soft gooey centre could not hold, could no longer contain the anger of simple lives shattered by the loss of their livelihood. Small business disappeared, swallowed by Big Boxes, erasing entire communities. There were no retaining plans, hell there were not even any retaining walls. It was a metaphoric scorched earth.

In years to come, there would be drilling in sacred lands, and Mother Nature herself would say to us, if you want scorched earth, I’ll give you scorched earth. Today we have no evolution to a cleaner, safer, green economy. Towns that weren’t erased are divided, ripped asunder, consumed whole, and the landscape is spotted with vacant malls, closed factories, and the shared realities that were chewed up and spit out by the lies of globalism. Think local - act global. What a bowl of fuck.

No the beginning of the end was way before Bill Clinton ruined the saxophone for everyone. How far back? Well, how far should we go?

Reagan’s Blackwater? Nixon‘s carpet bombing and dirty tricks? Oswald and Ruby?

What if the end already came and we are living in an alternate reality….

What if what we perceive as the beginning is actually the end, and we all died years ago?

What did the old prophets say would happen?

Hello darkness my old friend.

Do we find the truth in the amphetamine dreams of electric sheep?

Does the paranoid junk science of my beloved Philip K. Dick hold the blueprints to where we are headed?

Take a card, any card. Just don’t pull the thread.

Someone pulled the thread.

TELL THE TRUTH DENNIS.

For more on Lenore Herb, please visit the archives of my website: The Final Cut

Thank you for indulging my cheap little dreams.