2026.

I didn’t need to pull up Mom’s contact in order to call her long-ago memorized cell number, which she’d had since before the turn of the 21^st Century. (She was still Mom, after all.)

But instead of the call going through, I received an automated message: “mailbox is full.”

No biggie.

I pulled up the contact info for her residence.

The Bennetts seemed like good people.

Yet again, there was no answer. But at least this time I was forwarded to voicemail. So, I left a message.

With that, I had time on my hands while I waited for them to call back. My wife was off on a twelve mile hike through nearby Nantahala National Forest with my Mark 12 Combat Rifle and one of our two retired military combat dogs we’d rescued.

So I performed a simple online search for Mom,

As expected, Mom’s address was still listed as Southfield, Michigan.

It was also no surprise that Mom’s cell phone number was listed.

Her former home numbers still appeared as well.

Until her near-death experience and prolonged hospitalisation, she’d lived in the same house in Dearborn, Michigan where I’d grown up. Her home phone number had remained the same throughout that time. She’d also added a second line in 1998 which was reserved almost exclusively for dial-up internet use. It was also listed in her online search.

Both myself and my wife were always the first names listed as Mom’s family. Every search includes our current address. Most searches also included my current cell phone number, my previous cell phone number (which is still active), and my wife’s current cell phone which, like my previous cell phone number, has remained the same since Y2K.

Although Mom’s old phone numbers were listed, it seemed odd that the phone number at her most recent residence in Southfield was not.

And the top of the list was an unfamiliar number as her primary phone. It was a Tennessee area code.

Yet Mom had never been to Tennesse.

My aunt, however, lived near Nashville, in the upscale hamlet of Franklin.

The following day, when I reached the Bennetts by phone, I learned from Miss Kimberly that without notice, without explanation, without mentioning a word about it to anybody, Mom had abruptly moved out. She left no forwarding address. Nothing.

The last words Mom ever said to her was while Miss Kimberly was in the kitchen while her back was turned to Mom as she was facing the stove, cooking dinner:

“That smells good.”

Then, to quote Kaiser Sozë: “And just like that, poof: she was gone.”

It’s not that I had any reason to disbelieve Miss Kimberly. It’s just that what she’d told me made no sense.

Mom had signed over her home, which was then resold by the Bennetts for what I remember as being somewhere north of $200,000 dollars.

So why would Mom then simply abandon her arrangement and vacate the Bennetts home without saying a word?

Nevertheless, it was Miss Kimberly who helped me track down where Mom went after leaving their home.

She contacted the pharmacy Mom had used while she was living with the Bennetts. The pharmacist, in turn, then supplied Miss Kimberly with would turn out to be Mom’s last known address.

It was an independent living retirement community called Brookdale that was across town from the Bennetts, but nevertheless still in the same town, which explained why Mom was still reported online as living in Southfield.

“You call them first thing in the morning,” I remember Miss Kimberly telling me. “You’d be surprised how often this kind of thing happens. They’ll be thrilled to hear from you! When they can help one of their people reunite with their family, there’s no better feeling!”

The following morning, when I called Brookdale retirement community, the Brookdale retirement community didn’t seem thrilled to hear from me.

I had a bad feeling about this.

Official channels proved to be an exercise in obfuscation.

The first call kicked off with again and again being placed on ‘hold’ until, finally, an ugly woman’s voice, imbibed with a vapid air of manufactured suspicion, spit through the phone a disclaimer that their “community” had a strict policy against divulging resident information of any kind to anyone.

“Well, wouldn’t that mean she is a resident since it’s your policy is not to tell me anything about your residents? I mean, wouldn’t it make sense that if she wasn’t a resident, it’d be a lot easier for you just to say, ‘I’m sorry sir but there are no residents here with that name?’”

Not the smartest tactic to take. But I didn’t need Doctor Strange to tell me there was no way I wasn’t going to get anywhere anyway.

After hearing her say something that might as well have been a trombone “wah-wah-wah” like an unseen adult characters in a Peanuts cartoon, I bid the vapid voice a good day, got off the phone, and went to work.

This was proving to be an unexpected amount of bullshit to go through just to tell my strange/estranged Mom that her sister/my aunt was dead.

I next googled who owned/operated/managed Brookdale assisted living community. As it turns out, it’s national headquarters — also called Brookdale — happens to be located in Brentwood, Tennessee.

My aunt lived in Franklin, Tennessee.

Huh. That’s weird, I thought. Brentwood and Franklin neighbor one another.

Lest ye think me a conspiracy theorist, a lot of stuff is located near a lot of stuff and I’m comfortable chalking this up to coincidence unless a lot stronger evidence persuades me otherwise.

Back to work.

I called the Brookdale national headquarters.

The national headquarters told me I needed to call the national helpline.

I called Brookdale’s national helpline.

It was indeed helpful.

The female on the other side of the call took down a a “resident welfare verification” — aka a missing person’s report.

Then, over the next few days, I heard nothing.

After following up and following up on my follow up, the national helpline informed me that the Brookdale assisted living retirement residence in Southfield had “declined” the national headquarter’s request for assistance.

“Brookdale Southfield reported that they’re unable divulge any information due to HIPA laws,” explained the female at the national helpline. (surprisingly, yes, it was, by an amazing coincidence, the same person.)

“HIPA laws?” I’d asked. “Does that mean Mom is actually alive and well?”

My heart lightened. I breathed easier.

The national helpline concluded our call by telling me that if I wanted any more information, I’d have to contact Mom’s assisted living residence in Southfield.

Wait: whut?

Nevertheless, this was the hand I was dealt so I got back after it.

Following a further number of futile attempts I was finally able to reach an actual, living human being at Brookdale Southfield.

Once again, though, Brookdale Southfield refused to tell me anything.

In fact, even though the company’s national level had already confirmed that Mom had been a resident at Southfield, the Southfield residence once again refused to confirm that Mom was a resident there.

Twice, after hearing my Mother’s name, they actually hung up on me.

The first time, I heard a female voice tell the woman I was speaking to, loudly and agitatedly give the order to “Hang up, now.”

I immediately called back.

Click.

I immediately called back.

“Hope you packed a snack,” I said. “Cuz it’s gonna be a long fuckin’ day.”

I must’ve worn down their patience, because I was transferred to the head administrator of the Southfield facility. Her voice sounded the same as the voice who’d earlier ordered the administration staff to hang up on me.

The voice, who claimed to be the head administrator at Brookdale, finally, backhandedly, admitted that if Mom had been a resident there.

However, first she claimed that I was on a “Do Not Contact List.”

Then, the alleged administrator contradicted herself and Instead claimed that I was not listed anywhere in my Mom’s file.

Then that claim was ambiguously contradicted when I was told that I wasn’t listed as her next of kin, and her next of kin had been contacted and her next of kin had come by to pick up her belongings.

“So she did pass,” I asked. I was fighting back emotions. My mind was swimming against riptide waters.

The administrator cited HIPA law then stated “I’m not going to confirm that.”

“HIPA law covers patients who are alive,” I said with artificial certainty,

Once again, though, the alleged administrator smugly refused to do so.

(I’ve since learned that if a resident has passed, then the administration is legally required to disclose the circumstances of their death.)

The following day my phone rang. For nearly a half-hour I spoke with a well-positioned employee at Brookdale who remembered well and spoke fondly of my Mom.

If it were to be discovered that this person spoke with me, they would almost certainly be fired and maybe even face legal action.

This should tell you the same thing that it told about this person’s character and why it’s so important to protect their identity. This person did the right thing — even when no one else was looking.

My Mother had passed away.

And this is hard… Mom had actually passed away several months ago.

And I was only now hearing this.

And yet even now, somebody was risking their job just to tell me.

At the start of our conversation, they passed along to me the name of the physician who’d treated Mom’s during her time at her final residence.

I soon realized this person may have been Mom’s final friend.

They told me that according to Mom’s file, no next of kin had been recorded on her intake forms when she’d arrived there. Nor had her previous address been provided. Both spaces had been left blank.

Essentially, Mom had just appeared one day as a person without a past. She’d brought only a few boxes which reportedly carried a handful of her paintings, her photography equipment, and a laptop computer for which she didn’t have a charging cable.

My confidential Brookdale source recalled that Mom had never received a visitor. No family. No friends. Nobody had ever come to visit Mom.

Something that had always stayed with this person was when Mom once mentioned how much she missed her family, and especially her grandchildren, but she said she wasn’t allowed to contact us anymore.

“Who told her that?” I demanded.

“She said it was her sister.” Then, after a pause, they added almost as an afterthought: “But you know, I didn’t never see your Mama’s sister neither — not one time.”

But it seems there was one person she might’ve remembered seeing…

Shortly after Mom’s death, a late-middle-aged woman appeared at Brookdale. The woman reportedly had the same last name as my aunt. (For the record, however, that didn’t mean much, considering that my aunt maintained my late uncle’s late name: “Brown.”) The woman might’ve been seen being escorted by Brookdale staff to Mom’s room, where she then would’ve disappeared into alone with the door shut to unwelcome eyes and the outside world. Then, she might’ve been seen stuffing documents and important papers into her purse as she emerged a short time later.

In most cases, it apparently wasn’t uncommon for family members to show up shortly after the deaths of their loved ones in order to retrieve important documents such as their Last Will & Testament, birth certificates, marriage licences, life insurance policies, funeral preplanned funeral/cremation arrangements, photos for memorial ceremonies and wakes, etc. Then the families would almost always return soon thereafter in order to pack up the rest of their late loved one’s belongings.

But that’s not what happened.

It would’ve been a scene of unambiguous coldness almost impossible to forget when the unknown lady reportedly told the front desk that nobody would be coming back and she wanted them to throw out everything else.

It was all too much when I was told that soon after, whatever Mom might’ve owned that had any resale value had been divided up among select staff. Apparently, anything left unclaimed — her award-winning artwork and photography, family photos, pictures of her grandchildren, knickknacks and tchotchkes, her famous kitty cat handbag, and so on — was then dumped back into that same cardboard box she’d carried with her when she’d arrived as an old woman without a history, and unceremoniously hauled out to the Brookdale dumpster.

* * *

After collecting myself, I called the number for Mom’s final physician.

The kindness shown by the staff at Mom’s doctor’s office was the inverse of the callousness shown by the staff at the Brookdale residence.

Unfortunately, her physician hadn’t been present when Mom passed. But he was able to find out that Mom was been transported by ambulance from her residence to Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak.

Her cause of death was not made available even to her own doctor.

It looked like it had been my aunt who’d signed off on Mom’s death certificate. However, it wasn’t clear whether or not she’d actually been present when Mom died.

So it’s entirely plausible that Mom died alone.

This leads us to one of the defining questions of this mystery: regardless of whether or not my aunt was present when Mom died, it can be concluded with reasonable certainty that my aunt was aware that Mom had died.

So why didn’t my aunt tell her only sister’s family that their Mother/Grandmother had died?

It’s hard to imagine how any reasonable person could conclude this to be anything less than an act of uncommon cruelty.

But that wasn’t the most horrifying part of this story…

After my Mom had passed, her sister appears to have signed off on her body then being donated for scientific research.

This is the fate of Jane Does and people who have no family or next of kin.

But it might also be an option for a sister who decides that donating their sibling’s body to science could be a cost-free alternative to the expenses of a funeral or cremation.

Regardless of how and why Mom’s gruesome “Devil in the White City” fate may have befallen her, this was her doctor’s last avenue of inquiry before all remaining roads dead-ended at a wall of red tape.

My next step was to follow the money.

* * *

Because she’d taught there for 33 years, Mom had earned a very generous pension through the Lincoln Park School District.

She’d also belonged to the Lincoln Park Credit Union for more than a decade before I’d even been born.

I started with the Lincoln Park Credit Union.

I was shocked by what I learned.

The people at the credit union, despite immediately remembering who I was, apologized because they were unable to tell me anything about Mom’s account because it appeared that I no longer named on her account.

This seemed impossible.

I’ve always been on Mom’s account. Always.

Even when Mom was mad at me for one historically irrational reason or another, she would even have considered taking my name off her account.

The only thing the credit union would tell me was that the Social Security Administration had contacted them several months before and informed them that Mom had passed. After that, the direct deposit of her social security checks had stopped.

Next, I contacted the Lincoln Park School District.

They, too, remembered well both Mom and myself.

This time, I heard the woman’s voice break as I spoke to. She knew Mom and didn’t know Mom had died. She then helped direct me toward my next step. I’d need to contact the Michigan Office of Retirement Services (ORS) which was located in the state capital, Lansing.

When I called the ORS, the first person I spoke with was empathetic and eager to help. She forwarded my call to the appropriate office.

The attitude of the appropriate office turned wholly inappropriate.

I was tersely told that not only would the ORS offer absolutely no information, I would need a formal subpoena from an attorney with specially formatted questions after which the ORS would consider whether or not to tell me anything about my own Mother.

* * *

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2026.

By now, it’d been more than five years since Mom signed away her home after she’d nearly bought the farm at the hands of her thirty-three cats and mortgaged off the cat lady life in order to retire the last of her nine lives in assisted care.

Mr. and Mrs. German and Kimberly Bennett, who operated the senior home in Southfield, Michigan where she was living at, had always been really good about contacting me straight away whenever the situation arose.

Case in point: when Mom needed to be taken by ambulance to Beaumont Hospital in nearby Royal Oak because she was experiencing heart trouble. (You might recall that she’d already suffered a heart attack once before. This had occurred during my junior year in year in college. She’d been rushed to Oakwood Hospital; and in turn, our Daughter and I had rushed home to Dearborn.) Even as Miss Kimberly rode in the ambulance with Mom to the hospital, German Bennett texted us to let us know what was happening. My wife then called Miss Kimberly, who, as I recall, answered straight away. She the then proceeded to keep us up to date throughout the night and over the next few days.

Also, it wasn’t as though Mom herself had gone silent.

She’d remained engaged — albeit sporadically — on social media.

I remember one occasion in particular after we’d driven back down in Charlotte, North Carolina for our son’s prom with his longtime girlfriend.

We took lots and lots of pictures — lots of which my wife posted to Facebook.

Later that night, Mom left “loved” reaction to the post along with a very sweet comment. Mom mentioned that our son reminded her of George Harrison, her favorite Beatle who she’d had a crush on. She then recalled that she’d actually seen The Beatles in concert at the old Olympia Arena in Detroit. She even posted a pic of her ticket from the 2:00pm matinee concert on September 6, 1964.

But over the next year or so, reactions and comments became reactions without further comment.

A Mother’s Day message and a Happy Birthday! posted to her Facebook account received a “loved reaction” but otherwise went uncommented on. A Thanksgiving Day message (our favorite holiday) received a thumbs up.

In hindsight, I realize that this should’ve been even more concerning than it was at the time.

However, it was known to be fairly common for Mom to throw what my aunt called “holiday tantrums” on occasions such as holidays, birthdays, weddings, births, funerals, supermarket openings, special events, etc.

In other words, even under the most mundane of circumstances, Mom could become a bit of a “pity whore.” (In my defense, even if I did coin this particular term, I’d never intended it to pertain to Mom in particular.)

So, too, however, there was November, 2024. Donald Trump had been reelected. And so quite frankly, we assumed that this was TDS flaring up once again, and I was once again being scapegoated on behalf of the American electorate with sole responsibility for the outcome of a national presidential election.

(For the record, I took a new approach to presidential electoral politics when I hit the ballot box 2024. I voted for myself.)

Ultimately, there was one overarching consideration that shaped how I’d come to view my relationship with Mom.… I’m not the parent. I’m the child.

On paper, the concept looks simple enough. Why it’s taken my entire life to realize I couldn’t tell you. I guess chalk it up to “easier said than done.”

But by last fall, there were no longer even reactions to Holiday messages.

Christmas Cards mailed out from ourselves and from her grandkids went unanswered. Nor did we receive and sort of Holiday cards from her.

It was as if she’d fallen off the face of the earth.

The last time I spoke to my aunt, I was reassured that Mom was fine. She was just… “your mother,” as my aunt liked to say.

…And then my aunt was gone.

…And the past was history.

…And all I could think of was Mom.

* * *

By the time Mom found herself fighting for her life in the ICU at Oakwood Hospital in September of 2020, my aunt was living in Franklin, Tennessee.

For as long as I can remember, my aunt just had “it.” She was just cool. She was the embodiment of everything that was cool about her generation. She was tall, blonde, and stunningly beautiful. She was also incredibly intelligent. Despite being a working class Catholic kid and a woman living in a time where working class women were supposed to graduate high school and find a husband therein ends their story, she earned a full-ride scholarship to the University of Michigan — one of the top Public Ivy universities in America.

I’d heard the retelling of my aunt’s upbringing more than once at various holiday gathering throughout the years.

So the story goes, my aunt had studied nursing and pre-med and set her sights on becoming on a registered nurse. And it appears that my aunt had, indeed, realized that dream when she was hired as an an RN — and subsequently spent her career — at Oakwood Hospital in Dearborn.

I’d heard that she’d married her college sweetheart — a fellow Michigan undergrad who, I was told, had just been admitted to U-of-M law school.

Soon after their marriage, the newlyweds learned my aunt was pregnant.

This wasn’t what was going to slow down the drive of this power couple.

Instead, a horrific auto auto accident wrecked their world.

The top of the steering wheel shattered nearly all of my aunt’s perfect teeth.

The bottom of the steering wheel drove into her midsection.

Her unborn baby died almost instantly.

Her marriage, on the other hand, died a slow death.

But according to Mom, something else died inside my aunt on the day of that accident too.

The extent of her injuries were such that my aunt would never be able to have children.

At the same time, her husband’s law school aspirations reportedly spiraled and crashed. They’re said to have fallen into alcoholism. The perfect couple fell from their pedestal. The perfect marriage fell apart.

And that, I was told, was when she stopped being that free spirit Baby Boomer You’ve Come a Long Way Baby!™ woman for her time.

But there was a alternate version of this family story that was told as well. And in this less tragic version, I learned that the STI Chlamydia trachomatis, if left untreated, can result in serious reproductive health problems, including permanent infertility.

Either way, there seemed to be unanimous agreement that whatever the case, the result was that my aunt became afraid. She feared feeling unsafe. She feared feeling alone. She feared for her future. She feared what her future would look like without financial security.

But fortune smiled her upon when, not long before I was born, she met and married my Uncle.

And for the next 20 years or so, it had always seemed to me, at least, that it looked like she felt pretty safe.

My Uncle had grown up in a white collar life. His parents were wealthy; but he didn’t need their wealth. He was an engineer on the fast track at The Ford Motor Company. Working at its Dearborn World Headquarters known as “The Glass House,” He quickly moved up to become the lead engineer on the Ford Grand Marquis and Lincoln Continental.

And, like both my parents, my Uncle was once a racer. Unlike my parents, however, he raced a Porsche 550 Spyder, which now fetches between $3-Million and $5.5-Million dollars at auction.

When he’d met my aunt, he’d been a recent divorcee with two daughters from his previous marriage. I was told, and later I learned for myself that neither of my step-cousins cared for my aunt. Both reportedly considered her to be a bit of a gold digger. Both of them reportedly chose to live with their mom and I remember them spending relatively few holidays with us.

Their loss.

My Uncle became like a second father to me.

Some of my fondest memories were of his rice stuffing for the Thanksgiving Turkey and of he and watching with my Grandpa the Detroit Lions’ annual Thanksgiving Day Game; and of just he and I spending almost every New Year’s Day together, watching every college bowl game from morning until well after the clock struck midnight.

During the spring and summer, he’d take me to road rallies held at Ford’s Dearborn test track and in the back lot at “The Glass House.” Oftentimes he’d race his Porsche. More often than not, he’d win.

And that was my life for the first 18 years or so.

Then, my Grandpa dropped dead of a heart attack while he was buying our daughter her first Raggedy Anne and Raggedy Andy for her first birthday just a few days later.

He left behind a surprisingly large inheritance to his wife of 65 years, his two children, his two grandchildren, and his only great-granddaughter.

While we were there, however, when we were told that despite whatever Grandpa’s Last Will & Testament may have said, my grandmother was going to need their grandchildren and great-granddaughter’s inheritance in order to guarantee Grandma’s financial security. Instead, any inheritance would be paid forward after Grandma was gone.

I know very much about my Grandpa. Neither My Mom nor my aunt shared much about either of their parents. My Grandpa rarely talked much about himself. That’s too bad because for being “a retired factory worker and just a regular Joe,” as he’d refer to himself, he had a pretty cool life,

My Grandpa had demonstrated himself to be a standout baseball player and natural power hitter — so much so that he spent a number of seasons working his way up in the Detroit Tigers’ farm system.

In the offseason, Grandpa worked his way up the UAW ladder while working on the assembly line at the Ford-Wyoming DeSoto Chrysler automotive factory. (Back then, professional athletes needed to work in the offseason to support themselves and their families. For example, Gordie Howe worked at a metal factory in Galt, Ontario while he was playing in the NHL junior ranks. Before Shoeless Joe Jackson was known as “Shoeless Joe,” he was known as a “lint head” — a pejorative term used for textile factory workers throughout the Southern Carolinas.)

Grandpa held respect in the UAW. He was elected as the union leader for his factory; and in time he was elected as a union representative and delegate to the UAW National Convention.

Once, at a Friday Fish Fry at St. Cecilia’s Catholic Church — where my grandparents were parishioners and where I played basketball every Tuesday at “The Saint” — Grandpa ‘held court’, so-to-speak, with a number of his old friends. They talked about their time on the labor lines, and the day when a hired goon, known a “strike breaker” attacked Grandpa with a billie club. Grandpa was said to have relieved the company thug of his blunt instrument and then beat him into the hospital with with his own billie club.

It cost Grandpa around $3,000 to buy the home he and Grandma would raise their family, where they’d retire, and where they’d intended to spend the rest of his life. And if that wasn’t grand enough, he could practically walk to work at the auto factory that employed him for over 40 years.

And so, the ultimate joke seemed to be the played on Grandpa, when, one of the first things that was immediately announced after Grandpa died was that my Mom and aunt were going to be moving my Grandma out of the Detroit house where she and my Grandpa had raised both their daughters and where she’d lived with her husband of 65 years (they’d literally just celebrated their 65^th anniversary only a few months earlier in Frankenmuth, Michigan). Instead, she was being moved into a assisted living senior retirement community in Downriver Detroit. I’m not entirely sure how much Grandma knew about the move before we arrived at her house a few days after my Grandpa’s funeral in order to pack up the house.

“Your grandmother is going to need that money to pay for her care where she’s moving to,” I remember my Mom and my aunt had said.

“I thought that’s why we’re giving up all of our inheritance?” I’d asked.

I remember the question received no response.

I remember the subject was dropped, posthaste.

Then the strangest thing happened… almost nothing was taken out of my grandparents’ home. We organized everything on the first day. Then, on the second day, a giant dumpster showed up early in the morning and almost everything Grandpa ever owned was hauled out to the dumpster and then hauled away. Overnight, nearly nothing was left to remember to him by. It was almost as if his entire lifetime had been scrubbed from the archives.

ERROR!

404

GRANDFATHER NOT FOUND

One year later, my Uncle passed away from esophageal cancer. Before his death, I wasn’t allowed to go and see him anymore. When I asked why, I remember being told by my Mom that “You don’t need to be going to see him. Your aunt is going to need that money.” She explained that with my Uncle dead, my aunt was going to need every penny she could keep from his will to make sure she’d be okay.

It was bad enough, I’d hear my Mom and my aunt say, that my Uncle’s daughters were already coming around because, quote-unquote, “Those little bitches are smelling blood in the water.”

“What the heck: it’s their Dad,” I’d said, a bit horrified. “Their Dad is dying!”

It was then I realized that when it came to my Mom’s family, not only did money equal love, but when it came to money, love was subjective and subject to political and emotional manipulation. It was better to let my Uncle die believing that he was mostly unloved if that meant that the few people who he did believe cared about him received that much more of his inheritance. The reasoning seemed straight-forward and self-evident: my aunt, after all, had put in the work.

With her husband “dead,” my aunt no longer felt safe.

With my Uncle “dead,” my aunt no longer felt safe.

Every time I’d hear my Mom and/or my aunt say that my Uncle was “dead,” I shuddered. I’d think he’d actually died. Nope. Figure of speech.

Then came the day when I learned that my Uncle had died.

I asked about the funeral.

I was told not to worry about it. He’d already been buried. My aunt reportedly, quoting my Mom, “didn’t want to make a big deal out of it.”

I don’t know whether or not there’d been a funeral for my Uncle. I don’t know whether my Uncle had been cremated or buried. I don’t know whether there’s a dedicated gravesite, or if he ended up in an urn on my aunt’s mantle, or if his body has donated to science to save on costs.

I don’t know what happened to my Uncle.

After his death, my aunt was indeed left the lioness’ share of his estate.

By the fall of that year, my aunt relievedly revealed that she felt like she’d found love again with a man named “John” who commuted to Detroit regularly but lived in Seattle where, as I recall, he’d reportedly earned his wealth in the Tech Industry.

A few months later, and just one week before fall semester final exams of my senior year, my Grandmother passed away. It was stomach cancer.

The story I heard from my Grandma is that Once Upon a Time, she’d been a little girl born in a small shtetl in an area that had once been called the Pale of Settlement.

Then, one day, the Pale Settlement became “Ukraine;” and my grandma became not just a Jew but a “Ukrainian Jew;” and not just a “Ukrainian Jew” but a “Soviet Jew;” and being a “Soviet Jew” meant that they were now living under the rule of the leader of the Soviet Union: Joseph Stalin. And all that meant just about nothing to my grandma. That’s because kids, unlike adults, only know “normal” as the world they grow up in; not the fables and fairy tales of normalcy they’re taught.

My Grandma didn’t know that Ukraine was supposedly known as “The Breadbasket of the World.”

She might’ve believed that up until 1932.

That’s because 1932 was when famine rolled across the Ukrainian steppes with the lethal, destructive cruelty delivered like the onslaught of the German Blitzkrieg ten years later.

Known to history as the Holodomor, an estimated 3.9 million Ukrainians are believed to have died of starvation over the course of maybe a year.

The End… Literally.

Any family history connecting that time and my earliest memories will never be anything more than disembodied and disconnected hearsay and legend.

I don’t know how my grandparents met.

I don’t know if they were already married during the devastation of the Holodomor. If they had been, I’m not sure when or how grandma left her shtetl, arrived in the Polish city of Krakow, met Grandpa, and eventually immigrated to the New World together.

They might’ve met once after they’d both arrived in America. I remember that Grandma had been working at the cafeteria of Chrysler DeSoto factory. Maybe Grandpa saw her from afar or met her in line, and the rest is kismet.

What I do know is that for the rest of their lives, both Grandpa and Grandma declared Krakow as their home town and proudly claimed their nationality as Polish.

I also know unlike my Grandma, my Grandpa’s family was Roman Catholic.

I know that Grandma converted to Catholicism.

I know that the proudest I’d ever seen my Grandparents was when they learned I was being recruited by Notre Dame.

I know that even when she had to take the city bus, Grandma attended mass in Church just about every single day for the rest of her life.

I know that there was more to her devotion than faith alone.

I might’ve been the only person she this too: that Grandma was terrified, literally until the day she died, that somehow she’d be exposed as a Jewess and a fraud and sent back to the Old Country.

I know that my grandparents weren’t pleased that my Mom married into my father’s family, who were Anglican. (I know that Dad’s family was even less pleased that he’d married into a Catholic family — and a Slavic one at that.)

I know that after my parents divorce, Mom embraced her mother’s ethnic heritage and converted to Judaism. This was something, Grandma told me, that broke her heart. It felt to Grandma like a rejection of their re-engineered and Americanized family history.

I know that on the day Grandma died I should’ve made more of a scene after my Mom and aunt had just turned away the priest and I realized too late that he’d come to Grandma’s room to administer Last Rites.

Neither my Mom nor my aunt had told me that my Grandma was sick. (Then again, Grandma had remained mum about it too.)

This time, however, it appeared that it wasn’t just my aunt who didn’t feel safe. It seemed my Mom decided she was no longer feeling so safe herself.

Nobody will ever know what my Grandmother’s Last Will & Testament said because my Grandmother’s Last Will & Testament never saw the light of day. To the best that I can determine, while my Grandma was still on her deathbed, either my Mom or my aunt took their mother’s keys from the plastic ICU bag filled with her belongings. Then, either (or both) of them drove back to my Grandmother’s apartment, broke into her lockbox, and removed her Will. It was replaced by a note written in ballpoint pen on a scrap of paper torn from a side table in my Grandmother’s living room.

Shortly after my Grandmother passed, we returned to her apartment in order to “find” her lockbox with all her legal documents. But craziest thing: in the envelope marked “Last Will & Testament,” there was no will; but instead a note written in ballpoint pen on a scrap of notebook paper. It read:

“Those who do not work shall not eat.”

“That’s what the Captain of the Mayflower said to the Pilgrims before the first Thanksgiving,” my Mom proudly proclaimed. “It meant that those who didn’t participate in the harvest would not have a seat at the table for the Thanksgiving Feast.”

“I’ll bet it’s those guys who started the tradition of killing the Indians and taking all their stuff” I’d said, deadpan.

I remember staring at the note.

When Grandma emigrated from the Bloodlands, she was reasonable fluent writing in her native tongue. She wasn’t illiterate in English by any means, but she wrote almost exclusively in block letters and her penmanship looked absolutely nothing like the artistic flourishes expressed in Mom’s cursive writing — which I was now looking at as I was studying “Grandma’s” note.

“By the way, it wasn’t the captain of the frickin’ Mayflower,” I’d icily mused. “It’s from Second Thessalonians. I’m pretty sure the only thing she knew about Myles Standish is what she heard from Linus watching ‘A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving’.”

It would seem that when it came to my Mom’s and my aunt’s side of the family, legal documents such as a Last Will & Testament seemed to be treated more as a subjective thing — perhaps something closer to a spitballed suggestion thrown out there during a drunken brain storming session during a student project group meeting.

Something just to keep in mind for later.

In the absence of a Last Will & Testament, my Mom and my aunt, as their mother’s closest living heirs, took claim of Grandma’s estate. After picking out whatever seemed of value, the vast majority of Grandma’s life ended up in the dumpster of her assisted living retirement community.

* * *

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It was September 11^th and our nuclear family had gathered together in our 1,800 square-foot apartment in Charlotte, North Carolina because it happened to be my birthday. But more importantly, it happened to be the last time we’d all be able to be together before we moved up to mountains of Western Carolina.

It also happened to be a Friday night. Yet for the first time since our national crisis of September 11, 2001, there were no Friday Night Lights; for this global crisis of 2020 had stolen the national spotlight, casting its long shadow over a nation being largely kept in the dark.

Meanwhile, up in Michigan, concerned neighbours called the Dearborn Police to request a wellness check for my Mom. The neighbours reported that they hadn’t seen her in days.

Upon arriving at her home, Police saw that her car was in the driveway, but they were receiving no response from inside.

The police breached the front door to gain entry.

First responders discovered my Mom up in the second floor bathroom.

She’d apparently fallen while cleaning the multitude of upstairs cat boxes.

And for the next week, there she’d remained, on the floor with her face in one of the litter boxes.

Somehow she was alive. She was severely dehydrated and in critical condition; but nevertheless, she was alive.

Mom was in a bad state.

So was her house.

The feline population inside Mom’s 1,300 square-foot, two-story home had exploded. I believe the final cat count rescued by Dearborn Animal Control was reportedly thirty-three.

Thirty-three cats were counting on her. And yet there wasn’t a single human for whom she could count on.

Even as the ambulance was still en route, the crisis teamat Oakwood Hospital already had Mom’s medical records. This meant Oakwood already had her next of kin and emergency contact information. This meant Oakwood already had the phone numbers for both Mom’s youngest son (myself) and Mom’s little sister (my aunt). This meant Oakwood had already contacted us even before the ambulance had arrived at the hospital.

Both my aunt and myself had a connection not only to Mom (obviously) but to Oakwood Hospital itself. On a long ago September 11^th of Day’s Gone By, I’d been born at Oakwood Hospital. And it just so happened that Mom’s attending nurse had been none other than her very own baby sister.

Although my aunt had been retired for nearly two decades and was, at that time, living in the trendy and tony upscale hamlet of Franklin, Tennessee, she’d spent her career as a registered nurse at Oakwood Hospital. Despite the intervening years, however, her name still carried cache and garnered name recognition among the hospital staff and administrators.

I told the ICU nurse that I’d be on the road in 45 minutes. Then, nine hours and 650 miles thereafter, and I’d be in Dearborn.

But that’s the problem when the world is already stopped because of a global health threat: it’s not designed to start back up just because of a medical emergency.

Just like virtually every other hospital in America, it was Oakwood’s COVID policy that no family members would be allowed entry — even if it were their own mother. Instead it was strongly “recommended” that I do the same as my aunt had already declared, and continue to “shelter in place.”

Mom’s tough.

When I was in first grade, she survived serious auto wreck and underwent major back surgery.

She survived a stroke.

She survived a heart attack.

She survived breast cancer. She underwent a double-mastectomy to beat it; but she survived breast cancer.

Then, a decade later, she survived colon cancer.

(It’s a lot of frickin’ cancer.)

But as the disclaimer reminds us: past performance does not guarantee future results.

The following day, I contacted the laundry list of people involved in Mom’s care: the social worker assigned to her, her insurance carrier; her credit union; her primary care doctor; her Oakwood Hospital doctors, nurses and administrative staff; the City of Dearborn Animal Shelter which had rescued her cats; and the Dearborn FD, where I was trying to politic Chief Fire Inspector Jennifer Wenzel not to condemn Mom’s house.

It soon became clear that even after she was discharged, it seemed highly unlikely that things would ever go back to way they were — nor would Mom be able to return to her home of the last 33 years.

Therefore, the unreasonable stood to reason: if Mom’s house were to be condemned and declared “unfit for human habitation,” then the word “condemned” would’ve been a double-entendre being asked to do an extraordinary amount of the heavy lifting.

Somehow Mom interpreted the plan very differently.

She was still expecting the return of all of her cats.

But it was how she was expecting to see that happen that took us aback.

To save all thirty-three cats, she apparently believed the plan was for me to leave my wife and kids, move back up to Michigan, and move into her home where I would then take care of her cats while repairing and renovating her home. Then, once it was brought it up to code and made more “cat friendly,” Mom planned to return to her home.

Thus, the imperative seemed clear: if Mom’s old life was gone, her life would need new meaning.

It’s hard to articulate how heavy all this must’ve hit her.

Mom didn’t deserve to have all of her cats ripped away from her like that. And she sure as hell didn’t deserve to be told by the City of Dearborn that if she didn’t give up her home, then the City of Dearborn would condemn that home and the City of Dearborn would take that home from her and the City of Dearborn would profit from having taken her home.

If she couldn’t take care of herself anymore, that’s one thing.

But the doctor at Oakwood Hospital who was tasked with determining whether or not she was mentally competent to care for herself declined to make a dispositive determination.

In other words, it was reported that she’d been determined by law to have possessed the mental, physical, and cognitive fitness to continue manage her own healthcare.

True: Having thirty-three cats may not be considered normative behaviour.

Also True: This was her normal. This was the world she’d created for herself.

This. Was. Her. World.

And what nobody seemed to appreciate was that if her house was gone, her world would be gone with it.

One thing about Mom, she may have known as “The Crazy Cat Lady,” but she wasn’t crazy. She’d always had the wherewithal and common sense to leave me on all of her accounts. She always believed that if anything happened, I was probably the only person who’d step up for her.

And so, I contacted the Lincoln Park Credit Union where Mom had been a member since before I was born and where I’d always been on her account for as long as I could remember. As I’d done for her during her previous health crises over the years including her bought with breast cancer surgery just after my first year in the NFL and colon cancer surgery nearly a decade later, I seamlessly took charge of her bills and financial responsibilities — because it was the right thing to do.

When I contacted her credit union, which I’d also been a member of since literally the day I was born and the first savings bond was deposited in a savings account in my name, I was treated like a long lost family member as I paid the mortgage and remortgage payment(s) on my childhood home which she’d once paid off — and which the City of Dearborn was apparently considering condemning and/or taking possession of.

* * *

Mom spent the next several weeks — the first few in the ICU — in Oakwood Hospital in Dearborn, Michigan. It was touch and go.

About a month later, she was ready to be discharged to rehabilitation center.

But first I had to find one.

Even though Mom was a retired teacher with full pension, top-tier medical insurance, guaranteed Medicare, and even her own Wayne County social worker who’d been personally assigned through the Lincoln Park School District, it was taking a collective effort to locate a rehabilitation center with a quality reputation.

And yet, with a single phone call to the hospital administration, my aunt was able to secure for Mom a reservation at one of the very best rehab facilities in Metro Detroit.

Unfortunately? It was soon reported back that Mom was refusing to rehab.

It wasn’t much of a mystery to understand why refusing to rehab would lead to someone getting vote-kicked from their rehab facility.

Rather, the question was whether she was ever offered the opportunity to deal with not only the inevitable PTSD that undoubtedly must have accompanied such a horrifying near-death experience, but also the underlying trauma that she surely must’ve experienced due to the loss of the cats who’d essentially become her primary reason for being.

It didn’t matter if she was “The Cat Lady.”

If she couldn’t take care of herself anymore, that’s one thing.

But the doctor at Oakwood Hospital who was tasked with determining whether or not she was mentally competent to care for herself declined to make a dispositive determination.

In other words, it was reported that she’d been determined by law to have possessed the mental, physical, and cognitive fitness to continue manage her own healthcare.

It’s the difference between being “The Cat Lady” and the “Crazy Cat Lady.”

Therefore, the unreasonable stood to reason: if Mom’s house were to be condemned and declared “unfit for human habitation,” then the word “condemned” would’ve been a double-entendre being asked to do an extraordinary amount of the heavy lifting.

That means that Mom didn’t deserve to have all of her cats ripped away from her and treated in such a callous, almost cartoonish manner.

And she sure as hell didn’t deserve to be told by the City of Dearborn that if she didn’t give up her home, then the City of Dearborn would condemn that home and the City of Dearborn would take her home and profit from having taken her home by selling her home out from under her.

And so I was concerned about not only the level of trauma she’d already endured, but also the post-traumatic effects which were surely lying in wait.

If Mom’s old life was gone, maybe a new home might bring new, though maybe familiar, meaning.

If we brought Mom down South, she’d have somewhere new that she could call “Home.”

Mom has always been an Anglophile and an aficionado of Arthurian lore and legend.

And so, in a remarkable stroke of good fortune, we soon found an assisted living community called “Stonehenge” that was situated along the shore of Lake Nottely with a five range view of the Blue Ridge Mountains and located just 10 minutes away from our new house over the Georgia state line. And in a stupendously serendipitous stroke of odds-defying good fortune, one of our new neighbors happed to be the administrator there.

What’s more, Stonehenge was pet friendly. And not only that, thanks to our new neighbor, an executive decision was made that would allow Mom to bring not one but three cats from Michigan!

Best of all, Memaw would be just 10 minutes away from her grandchildren. Gone would be the chaos of her feline family that nearly killed her — replaced by the three cats she loved the most and surrounded by the love of her family.

But never underestimate the chaotic nature of family, and the chaos of human nature.

* * *

Mom decided against moving down South to spend her salad days with her grandchildren because apparently, she’d once again become convinced that I’d just voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

She’d convinced herself of the same thing back in 2016.

I didn’t realize at the time why she’d refused to speak to me for nearly a year l, but she’d apparently disowned me on Wednesday, November 8, 2016. This, you probably could’ve already guessed, was the day of the U.S. Presidential Election and the historic upset of heavily-favored Hilary Clinton by upstart Donald Trump.

Mom was “With Her.” And Mom was frickin’ pissed when instead of breaking the glass ceiling, Hilary’s POTUS plans splatted like a bug on the windshield of American culture.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but for whatever reason, Mom had apparently decided that the fault was entirely mine for Trump’s upset victory because, she’d said, I’d voted for Donald Trump.

According to Mom’s math, apparently, a single vote cast in Charlotte - allegedly by myself - had somehow not only counted as 3.6% of the voter total in North Carolina, but also added up to 1.2% of the votes in Florida and 10,000 ballots cast in Mom’s own state of Michigan which, if you think about it, technically should’ve been canceled out by Mom’s vote in the Wolverine State for Hilary Clinton.

Nevertheless, it Mom’s eyes, it had apparently been all my doing that allegedly allowed Donald Trump to grab Lady Liberty by the pussy.

First she’d stopped speaking to me.

Then, she’d unfriended me on Facebook.

That’s right: my own mother unfriended me from Facebook.

And for boomers, unfriending someone on Facebook is apparently a big frickin’ deal that could be considered on par with getting vote-kicked out of Skull & Bones.

And in fairness, my experience became the experience of a lot of people punctuated just a few short weeks later at Thanksgiving dinners across America. The 2016 Presidential Election could be considered the embryonic phase of what’s colloquially come to be called ‘cancel culture’.

It destroyed families.

I remember thinking that what made Mom’s decision particularly painful was that she made it at the same time our house had been foreclosed on and we were moving out with nowhere to move to. In other words, her son, her daughter-in-law, and her only grandchildren had literally just become homeless; but it mattered more important to punish us all because of the way I voted.

Was Mom’s decision definitively deranged?

I mean… 2020 as a whole was deranged AF.

The year 2020 will be remembered as The Age of COVID. It’ll be remembered as The Summer of George Floyd. It’ll be remembered for the “Fiery but Peaceful” Peak Woke Revolution. And it’ll be remembered as the year of the 59^th U.S. Presidential Election.

In the interceding quaternary since America’s 58th Presidential Election, Mom had restablished cordial contact and temperate tone with myself.

To her credit, however, Mom reestablished a more amiable approach towards her daughter-in-law and her only grandchildren.

In fact, our oldest daughter had invited her Memaw to her upcoming wedding at the end of October. Because I’m an ordained minister, our daughter had asked me to officiate the wedding. But because of COVID restrictions, it was going to be held outdoors at the National Arboretum in the mountains of Asheville, North Carolina. The guest list was going to have to be an extremely parred-down. But Memaw made the cut.

Our hope was that we’d be able to have her moved down South in time for the wedding.

But Meemaw wasn’t going make the wedding.

Such was life with Mom.

We just had to accept that she was who she was, she had the right to make her own decisions and live her own life, she seemed to be moving to a safe place, and we’d always here for her.

So, for reasons all her own but nevertheless regrettably reasonable, Mom decided against moving out of Michigan.

Her decision wasn’t all that surprising. Until she came out to Philly for the birth of our son at the start of my rookie year in the NFL, the only time Mom had left the state of Michigan during my lifetime was when she and her star pupil had been honored at the Carnegie National Scholastic Arts & Writing National Ceremony held at Carnegie Hall in New York City. It’s the nation’s highest honor for creative talent at the high school level.

Instead, Mom decided to move into to a senior care home in Southfield which run by a couple named Kimberly & German Bennett who were reportedly well known and had a solid reputation in the community. Kimberly Bennett was outgoing, friendly, nurturing by nature, and remains, according to her Facebook profile, a “Television Host, Wife, Mother, Honeygram, Friend, Entrepreneur, Caregiver and much more!”

In order to pay for her care, Mom would sign over her home to the Bennetts. It had been Mom’s house for more than 30 years. Now, its sale would be turned into the funding needed to pay for the home where it seemed she’d spend the rest of her life.

* * *

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Not all mysterious deaths are a murder mystery.

It’s been over two months since I found out that my Mom had passed away.

Note what I said there: since I found out that my mom passed away.

I found out that she’d actually died several months before and I was simply never told.

The only reason I found out at all is because I learned that my aunt had passed away. It turns out that she died several months after my Mom.

It didn’t take too long to find out that my aunt apparently did know that my Mom had died.

Yet for reasons the rest of us will never learn, it would seem she elected to say nothing and carry it to her grave.

Since learning all of this, there’s barely been time to grieve.

Or, maybe I’m delaying the process because right now.

Whatever the case, Mom’s death remains a mystery.

There are just two many questions.

Answers have been anything but forthcoming.

All avenues have led to nothing. And the trail has led down dead end roads and taken dark turns.

The evidence seems to support the worst case scenario: my Mother died alone. Then, as if that wasn’t heartbreaking enough her body was subsequently “donated to science.” (Quote-unquote.) And the reason I believe that my aunt knew that my Mom had died? It’s reportedly her signature that appears as the witness on her death certificate.

I say “reportedly” because despite numerous attempts and different approaches with various agencies to obtain a copy of that death certificate, I’ve been denied each time.

And so far, it would appears that nobody knows, nobody cares, or somebody cares enough that they don’t want anybody to know what happened to Mom’s mortal remains.

…All of which seems mighty frickin’ peculiar.

So, how can anybody find anybody down when there isn’t any body to find?

* * *

Cat situation not withstanding, I would think that my Mom would’ve wanted to be remembered as both an artist and an educator.

I’d like to think she also might appreciate the reminder that back in the day, she’d been a racer. Although I rarely heard her talk about that time during her twenties, my mother had been a race car driver.

In fact, that’s how my parents met.

My dad, who’d also harbored racing dreams struck up a conversation while they were both buying racing tires at Schaefer Auto Shop in Dearborn. (It just so happens that decades later, I would grow up just a few blocks from where that race shop in still in business.) The two racers learned that they’d been competing on the same grass roots racing circuit.

The future was bright. The rest was history.

Here, too was a woman who dedicated her life to being an educator. She taught for 33 years in the Lincoln Park School District in Downriver Detroit — first as an elementary school teacher and then as head of the art department at Lincoln Park High School. Six times she was named “Teacher of the Year.”

In the winter of 1982, she pioneered the school district’s first computer program which resulted in the introduction of one of the first high school computer labs in the state, and one of the first elementary school computer labs in the nation. (Keep in mind that the first personal computer, the IBM Model 5150, had debuted just a few months earlier, on August 12, 1981.)

She spent the last dozen years of her career as the head of the art department at Lincoln Park High School. Three of her students were nationally recognized for their work. A mural produced by students which was based on Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” received national recognition — as well as correspondence from Billy Joel himself.

So Mom wasn’t some clichéd caricature of the quintessential “Me Generation” narcissistic boomer. She made the world a better place and equipped future generations with the ability to do the same.

But then there also is this: Mom, first and foremost, almost certainly would’ve self-identified as “The Cat Lady.”

We’d always had cats. But it seemed like it was after my older brother left for the military when Mom began a downward spiral that stretched back to the Clinton Administration.

What started as two cats doubled to four. Then she adopted a fifth. It was over a year before she added numbers six and seven. Soon after, came cats eight and nine. At some point during my senior year, the cat count hit twelve. By the time I graduated high school, there were a baker’s dozen.

On the day we brought home our newborn daughter to Mom’s house for the first time, there were sixteen cats to greet us.

I know that being a single mother raising two sons couldn’t have been easy. But being raised by a mom who was a cat lady (sorry: “The Cat Lady”) it left some lasting scratches.

And, like virtually every self-absorbed, self-conscious, immature, still-developing male teenage brain, there was unambiguous humiliation.

Looking back, it was partly that humiliation that I channeled into self-centered, selfish, egocentric dickhead personality displays and other shortcomings that often come from kids who come from dysfunctional homes. And I redirected that ego-driven humiliation into what you might call “deflectionary overachievement.”

And now we don’t know where she is ands we don’t know happened to her.

To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense on 9/11 and an architect of the quagmire war in Iraq: we don’t know what we don’t know.

* * *

In a 1789 letter to his friend, the French scientist Jean-Baptiste LeRoy, Founding Father Benjamin Franklin is believed to have coined the idiom, “In this world, nothing can be certain but death and taxes.”

So it’s fitting, perhaps, that the mystery surrounding my Mom’s death could be said to have started on Tax Day: April 15^th, 2026. This was the day that I’d learned my aunt had passed away.

April 15^th also happens to be the anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912. For whatever reason, this factoid also strikes me as peculiarly apropos.

As soon as learned about my aunt, my thoughts shifted to Mom. Did she know her baby sister had died?

My aunt was Mom’s sole sibling and the only other surviving members from their side of my family other than my brother and I.

If she had heard the news, she almost certainly would’ve contacted me.

Right?

Each and every one us of have our own issues. Every person, to varying degrees, lives their own Bell Curve. We’re all engineered by nature and nurture. We’re all capable of reengineering ourselves. We don’t have to remain the smaller of who we might’ve been.

Zoom out, and families have a tendency to be no different.

The maternal side of my family wore fratricidal envy on their sleeves like a cheap, off-the-rack Sunday best suicide vest. This supremely dysfunctional family trait detonated time and time again throughout the years, cratering our family and leaving it in dysfunctional ruin. It was a practice so abhorrent that it alienated all of us from one another to varying degree; and eventually I alienated myself from them to varying degrees for the sake of shielding my own nuclear family. It’s taken years to achieve some degree of recovery. I’ll be in recovery for the rest of my life.

So I’ll only say this: my brother, like the rest of us, has demons who are his own. Discussing them would be less helpful in advancing this story and do more to reveal a petty nature I’m determined to reengineer.

I haven’t spoken to my brother since the fall of 2020, shortly after our Mother was in the ICU at Oakwood Hospital in Dearborn, Michigan.

* * *

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Would it have been quote-unquote “better to wait until we’re more ready to have a family?”

Not for our Daughter.

Nor for us.

Family time punctuate the happiest times of our lives and serve as lifelines that lead us out of our darkest hour. Families draw strength from each other. They make it possible to do things we never dreamt we could do; and lift us up so we might realize dreams we could never reach alone.

So I’d say that our Daughter arrived right on time.

And speaking for myself, Fathers’ Day isn’t so much about being honored by my kids. Rather, it’s a reminder of how honored I am to be their Dad.

Happy Fathers’ Day.

I love conspiracies.

When a conspiracy is a real banger, it could, quite literally, make you question the nature of reality.

Conspiracies are typically based on some kernel of truth (more or less), some sort of Wiki Search (because trust in the all-knowing internet is crucial), and a whole lotta blind assumptions, and wistful imagination. This then gets cross pollinated into some unlikely “what if?”

Now, it’s certainly no certainty that your new conspiracy theory will be anymore anchored in any sort of reality that goes beyond the aforementioned truth kernel. It isn’t true. But is something you really, really wish were true. And so, ‘tis true.

Now take your cobbled together bullshit and amplify it across enough social media sights (again: god bless this internet) and KA-BOOM! ‘Tis true some more.

But one of the biggest problems, in my opinion, with conspiracies?

Frankly, too many of them are just plain lazy.

Take, for example, the conspiracy theory that there were no planes, but rather holograms that blew up the World Trade Center?

Really? That’s all you got?

Yes, of course there were holograms involved.

Duh.

But those holograms were needed in order to cover up the real story…

September 11, 2001 was the first shot in an interplanetary alien invasion. And the aliens were attempting to start the war with a false flag operation, just like Hitler did.

[Pro Gamer Tip: try and wrap up your gift-to-the-world conspiracy with a big holiday bow called Adolph Hitler. I have no concrete evidence why dragging the führer into it will make the “legitimacy” of your conspiracy skyrocket. But it does.) In this case, the nazis (interchangeable with Hitler) used alien hologram technology to camouflage their alien ships to make them look like commercial airliners.]

(No: I do not know what happened to the “so-called” passengers. Maybe something to do with the nazis? I dunno; but you’re welcome to take the baton and run with it.)

So there you have it.

And now, away we… GO.

Our first conspiracy for 🐝 the Conspiracy is pretty straight forward and quite timely indeed. We’ll call it… (NOTE: always use “we’ll” — never use “I.” That way people will think you’re a bunch of people — cool AF people — who are on board with this and not just some batshit crazy dipshit with access to the internet).

Anywho, let’s title our kickoff conspiracy:

“THE PAPAL AMERICAN”

Think about it:

The Catholic Church, and in particular (then) Pope Francis, has been vocally critical of newly-inaugurated U.S. vice- president JD Vance.

Vance, who himself is Catholic, is none-to-pleased with (then) Pope Francis opening his big yap and spouting off about all people being equal in the eyes of God or some other anti-American bullshit that fails to fall within the sphere of U.S. interests.

And so, on Easter Sunday 2025, the Veep visits the Vatican for the first time.

Veep Vance seems starstruck meeting the Pope.

But the very next morning? His Holiness is f*cking DEAD.

Just. Like. That.

The official cause of death?

A stroke.

A goddamned stroke.

This one’s for you, James “Sweet” Jesus Angleton.

Speaking of which…

Enter:

C.

I.

fuckin’-A.

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As with every death of every Pope, a conclave is called. The leaders of the Catholic Church will come together to elect a new Pope.

But in the first round of voting, and in a manner maybe more legitimate than any American or European Union election over the past few years, the Conclave fails to decide on a new Pope.

And with that, CIA convinces the Conclave to try out (for FREE!!!) its new AI program, “CompClave” to elect their new Pope.

The Conclave agrees.

And so, just like that, “CompClave” spits out it’s decision and bingo night: the Vatican chimney goes from black smoke to white snake (okay, sometimes spell checker is frickin’ awesome so I’m leaving that); or rather, white smoke now darkens the Vatican sky. The CompClave — er, conclave — has just anointed elected the very first American Pope in the 40,000 year history or whatever of the Catholic Church.

Robert Prevost — “Pope Bob” to his friends — born and raised in the Southside of Chicago. He’s also said to be an alumnus of Villanova University in Philadelphia.

Now, maybe, the Church finally might have a Pope who might finally be able to f*ck some people up.

Even more, it would seem that as of right the f*ck now, it would appear that God Himself may have been put on alert just anyone else might want to mess with the U.S.:

F*ck around and find out.

So there you have it: the very first, fabricated from the unknown, 🐝 the Conspiracy.

Now go: conspire. Frolic. 🐝 fruitful.

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Don’t let others define you by who you are at this moment. Your life is not a snapshot. You are more than this moment.

We rise and fall like the tides. We withdraw. But then? We come roaring back.

If you feel lost at sea and you don’t think you’re going to make it back to shore, remember:

Even if you don’t realize it:

You are loved.

Even if you don’t recognize it:

You are loved.

Even if you don’t want to be —

Even if you feel like you don’t deserve to be —

You are loved.

And whether you feel like it or not: you deserve to loved.

Let that be the light that guides you Home.

A  lot of you don’t know me and that’s okay. Those that do me know I hold you in my heart with equal love regardless of what your politics and beliefs may be.

That being said, please don’t write a single word about today’s verdict for now. If if you’ve already posted something, please unpublish it.

As counterintuitive as this may seem, I’m imploring you: we need to NOT talk about today’s verdict for a little bit.

We are standing on the razor’s edge, friends and neighbors.

We cannot f*ck this up.

If you are overjoyed, you will be hated for it.

If you are enraged at the injustice, you will be mocked for it.

If we start screaming at each other now, the divide will widen. It will become a gulf, and it will swallow us whole.

And I will fucking hate you for pushing us that much closer to the brink.

Those who would take the Net right now to gloat, or grief or fed post is not a friend. Not to me. Not to You. Not to Us. Not to U.S.

Here’s what I propose:

It’s 7:00pm on Thursday, May 30.

I ask that you hold off until 7:00am tomorrow, on Friday Morning, May 31st.

That’s 12 hours.

Don’t worry: you’re snarky, snappy, always smart thoughts will still be there.

But right now, we need to make sure WE will still be there. We need to make sure WE will still be willing to talk to one another.

We’re in danger of this thing tearing us apart.

Don’t let it.

I’ve no doubt the traditional trolls have already posted the bullshit they’ve been dying to post since the indictments were first announced.

We need to be worried about keeping each other alive.

This isn’t about what “they” do.

F*ck them.

I’m asking you to pick clicks over country.

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I’m pretty damn good at conspiracy theories.

I don’t mean that in order to come off as sounding like a braggadocio.

Okay, maybe a little.

But what I mean is, I’m really good at coming up with them.

Nine-times-out-of-ten, I have absolutely no legitimate basis. I’ve usually just invented them out of whole cloth. And yes: they’re usually complete bullshit.

They’re almost always born of me laughing to myself; then when I notice the fam looking at me like either I have Tourette Syndrome and/or the cheese has finally slipped off the cracker, I start with “Wouldn’t it be funny if…”

But the really weird part is that sometimes — a little too often for my comfort — it turns out to be the case that I might actually be on to something.

When that happens, I usually have no idea what I did or what just happened.

I guess I just pull on disparate threads from here or these, connect obtuse facts in some self-disturbing Beautiful Mind sort of way, and voila: conspiracy concept ahoy.

Probably the best one is “Marcel Ship to Dallas.”

Back at NFL Films, Ryan, my best friend at Films and a brilliant producer (and human being as well), just invented a rumor one day while hanging out in my office — aka “The Dorm Room.” It had occurred right near the trading deadline. Dallas needed a running back. Marcel Ship was a decent running back who was playing for the Arizona Cardinals. That’s it. Literally. There was no evidence.

And yet the joke somehow slipped out from my office and started wafting down the halls. Somehow it made it to the office of the senior producer who was the liaison between NFL Films and the new NFL Network which had just been launched only a few weeks earlier.

At the time I was also pulling double-duty as both a Films Producer as well as the highlight supervisor and for the Network’s new “College Football Sunday.” NFL Films President Steve Sabol, NFL Network President Howard Katz, and Network VP (and legendary ESPN executive) Bill Graff had also placed me in charge of NFL Film’s new college player scouting program.

So I guess that lended some illusion of credibility?

Regardless, by 5:00pm, the senior producer and NFL Films/NFL Network Liaison had already held a meeting of the minds with the NFL Network braintrust out in LA. Next thing we knew, their was the Network’s flagship show, anchored by Rich Eisen, confiding to America that there were reportedly ongoing conversations between the Cowboys and Cardinals involving a potential trade that would send Arizona running back Marcel Ship to Dallas.

From that day forward, Ryan and I saw the world a little different.

I can’t stand the fact that today my stupid little “what ifs” seem to be “on to something” a little more often than they used to be.

I’m pretty positive it has nothing to do with me.

Rather, we now operate in a world that’s fueled by conspiracy theories.

We live in a time where Truth is ridiculed as conspiracy… until said time when the Truth may serve more value to the hegemony than the lies we were being lead by up until that point.

Not long before 9/11, I’d written a research paper for one of my classes that was based on a long-term study that demonstrated how throughout Middle East, nearly 75-percent of all people relied predominantly on conspiracy theory in order to shape their everyday understanding of world events.

What made the report extraordinary was the fact that its authors had taken a fairly extraordinary step. Instead of dismissing those same citizens of Middle Eastern nations as ignorant, fanatical, rubes, etc., the researchers had instead done their f*cking jobs by taking the next step: looking to identify the most likely reasons why.

What they established was that in any state under authoritative rule — not just in the Middle East but throughout the world — human beings who are subjugated by oppressive rule and government control of the media tend to react about 75-percent of the time by rejecting state-sponsored propaganda in favor of conspiracy.

What’s more, the vast majority of these people are well-aware and fully understand that by adopting this approach, they’re shaping their world views primarily through these unsubstantiated conspiracy theories. However, the vast majority of them also believed that those rumors, theories, and conspiracies also tended to be closer to what was really happening than the false realities being peddled by the State.

I constantly think about that 75-percent. But I constantly forget that very few of our friends and neighbors know this study.

So I found it to be an epiphany that in our Post-9/11 reality, 75-percent of Americans now reportedly rely on what’s commonly condemned by mainstream media as conspiracy theory in order to shape our ordinary world.

(That’s on both sides of aisle, by the way. We are all aware that the leadership and their sock puppets are lying sacks of sh*t. But let’s face it: we’re also all aware that there’s not a whole hell of a lot we can do about it. “They” control the First Amendment. And even though the Second Amendment is essentially intended for when the First Amendment fails, the Second Amendment of Fight Club is that “You Don’t Talk About Fight Club.” And “Fed Posting” — using the First Amendment to encourage the Second — is about as stupid and suicidal as it gets.)

But know this: parroting state-sponsored apologetics helps nobody. It grievously silences hopes for a national discussion. And from a personal perspective, it causes me to instantly dismiss you as either a fed or a bot. There’s no difference.

When you respond to somebody by asking “how much is Putin paying you?”

Shut the F*ck Up.

Whether or not you realize it, you’re aping the 2016 Hilary Clinton Presidential Campaign where the tactic was to essentially frame opponent Donald Trump using evidence that now appears to have been almost entirely manufactured. And before you even get started, just stop it. I was certainly no fan of Donald Trump then. I like him even less now. But that does nothing to change the fact that the evidence debunking the Russia Collusion Hoax is overwhelming. Clinton herself wrote not one but two books, seemingly in furtherance of injecting these lies into our national discourse like an mRNA vaccine meant to alter our fundamental DNA.

And when you call college kids “Marxists” or “Neo-Marxists” or, even more stupidly, “Maoists?”

Shut the F*ck Up.

These are our CHILDREN. If you have that little faith and trust in your child that you think you’ve raised the kind of person who’d head off to college and in short order shrug off the first 18 years of upbringing under your love and leadership in favor of a foreign ideology that runs completely counter to the ideals and values you’ve instilled in them since birth? That’s your hang-up; not your kids’. Don’t blame how your kids turned out because you turned out to be a garbage parent.

So with that that in mind, when you accuse protesters of the Israeli siege of Palestine of being supporters of Hamas?

Shut the F*ck Up.

That’s like the Walt Disney Company accusing somebody of being supporters of ESPN. Hamas is virtually a goddamned subsidiary of the Israeli government.

Disagree all you want. That’s your First Amendment Right. But it won’t change the fact that the evidence appears overwhelming. Israel funds Hamas. Israel props it up and supplies some of the strong-arming needs to maintain its political power. Israel helps facilitate its arms deals. Hell, Israel essentially foot the bill to pay for their paragliding lessons.

Facts. Yes. Sucks? Big Time. But Facts nonetheless.

For further framing, please refer to the Pam Beesly meme from The Office:

The truth, it would appear, is that if Israel really wanted to “track down Hamas,” they probably would’ve had better luck if they’d started with their own employee directory. For all we know, they already maintain right on file their cell numbers and addresses for where to send their last paychecks.

It’s easy to blindly answer that this is the result of the horrific events of October 7. It’s a lot harder to ask why Israel itself refuses to hold its own government accountable for its role in facilitating the inhumanity of that terrible day in the Fall.

So no: our Children are not “supporting terrorism,” or, even more f*cked up to say, “domestic terrorists.” Our children are opposed to what’s happening an ocean away because most of our children don’t believe We should be supplying a foreign nation with bombs being used to drop on the heads of women and children. That goes against everything that defines who we’re supposed to be as Americans. Our children are representing the ideals we taught them, while our elected representatives appear to be paid spokesmen beholden to a foreign goverment.

What should be surprising is why we’re not demanding answers to why the exorbitant tuition we’re paying for our kids to attend university are instead being used to enrich the arms industry.

Look: I like watching sh*t get blowed up as much as the next guy.

But our kids have been through enough these past four years. They are “Generation COVID.” The time has come to start supporting them instead of supporting alleged war crimes being carried out by foreign nations. That is, if it’s not too late already.

So please: stop with the indoctrinated bot-lines and poorly concealed fed posts.

It’s not clever, it’s not erudite, it’s not okay, and it’s not helping.

It’s evidence of otherwise intelligent people buying into the propaganda that teaches us to hate each other instead of working together to fix the problem and save ourselves from ourselves.

It’s an act in which we’re actively assuaging critical thought in favor of tired tropes and Madison Avenue/Intelligence Community concocted catch phrases.

Is that really who you want to be or how how you want our choices to be remembered?

Do you really believe doing that doing the right thing means never so much as questioning how these false narratives came about, or who came up with them, or why?

Or, you can go with —

“HOW ‘BOUT THEM COWBOYS?!?”

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I’m home.

And that’s pretty dang cool.

Spoiler Alert: This Was Not It.

Even though we still don’t know what caused this to happen, this is definitely one of those occasions where the result itself is far more important than the reason for it. But it would still be nice to know, so that maybe we can implement some active measures to better prevent it from happening again.

Presently I feel like I got speared in the back just below my right scapula by the helmet of an onrushing linebacker. It hurts like hell. But sometimes pain is a reminder that you’re still alive and still in the game.

Nevertheless, it still doesn’t answer the question: what the hell was that all about?

After all, how the hell does someone’s heart nearly shut down but every test reveals that it’s functioning well within manufacturer specs and still under warranty?

Had my immune system suddenly unlocked some long-dormant antibody that fought off whatever it was that was threatening to kill me?

“Nah, bro,” I explained. “I just started pounding my reserve supply of Adderall.”

I usually hold back on my narcolepsy medication because last year there was a nationwide shortage and lemme tell you: that sucked. And, I just happened to have on hand in that big plastic hospital bag that held all the presently-at-hand-wordly-possessions part of that reserve, unassumingly stashed in a chrome container in the left front pocket of my Levis 511 athletic fit blue jeans that grateful as I am, still make my ass look pretty damn not too bad.

At that point, I just figured, “If not now, when?”

And so, somewhere between Divine Intervention and Devine Inspiration, our Prayers appear to have been answered.

Ever so slowly, yet ever so steadily, my BP began to rise. At around 4:30am, I was wide the f*ck awake, wired to the B’Jesus, and my BP had risen back up to 115/78.

Since then, even as I tapered my Addy intake back down to nil, my BP has held surprisingly steady. But hopefully, Thanks Be to The LORD, I’m out of the woods.

Remember how bent out of shape Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo got over claims that Ivermectin and monoclonals may have played a positive role in aiding patients recovering from COVID? I’d frickin’ love to see those two polyester-souled imbeciles go positively apoplectic over the mere suggestion that a reckless combination of Red Bull and Adderall may have medicinal value.

For their part, the medical staff seemed understandably relieved — albeit pleasantly bewildered.

No known bacteria was detected.

No known virus was detected.

Parasite? Negative.

Fungus? Negative.

Histamine levels were normal. So it doesn’t appear to have been an allergic reaction.

T-Cells were normal.

White blood cell count: normal.

Cholesterol: Normal.

Glucose: Goldilocks Normal — neither too high nor low.

Normal testosterone for someone my age is less than 50. Mine was 257.

EKG: …NORMAL.

I literally have he heart health of a 20-year-old.

All that just goes to show: we can live right; and yet? One day: [Snaps fingers].

I’d chalked it up to dehydration.

Including our mountain, we have about 12.4 acres of land. To stay in shape, I use a push mower to tackle about 7 of those acres. This includes the football field I’m building. Over the last couple years, I’ve actually managed to reclaim about 2 of those acres which used to be nothing but brush, and another 3-acre field which used to be basically a floodplain marsh across the road from our creek.

So my best guess as of now is that the triggering event will have been serious dehydration combined with a long-term history of neurological trauma. Brains need to float. When they don’t, they end to tell the autonomic nervous system to do some pretty crazy sh*t. Then, next thing you know, you’re slurring your way one last time through the song “Daisy” while Jupiter looms just over the spring green Blue Ridge Mountains right outside your hospital room window.

I must say: there was a lot of stuff running circles in the hamster wheel of my mind. There’s one in particular I’d like to share…

Over the course of a weekend, a couple weeks back, I must’ve annoyed the sh*t out of Charlotte Pendragon — one of my dearest friends on SubStack. On Friday, I’d read that another member (well, former member) of our community, Max Crosby, had committed suicide by setting himself alight outside of the courthouse in NYC where the Donald Trump v. Stormy Daniels Trial was just getting underway.

This was about a week after I’d written and published the first part of my latest blockbuster, American Zeitgeist shattering series, “A Tale of Two Aarons.” As you may recall from literally every other newsletter on SubStack as well as every known publication and periodical throughout the Western World, the series started with a meditation about Aaron Bushnell, the USAF Senior Airman who’d self-immolated outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC.

In all seriousness, Bushnell’s story had affected me.

It wan’t just because of the act itself; nor the undeniable gravity of the act, which Aaron allegedly undertook as a of protest against the horrific crimes against humanity allegedly being committed by the Israeli military against the civilian population of Palestinians in Gaza. It touched me because our Daughter would’ve been around the same age as Aaron. I believe they’d both graduated high school in the same year — 2016.

I could’ve sworn that Max Crosby had read what I’d written and either posted a brief comment, or, at the very least, liked it.

However, when I went back to my post and looked for Crosby’s name, I saw nothing.

That struck me as odd and perhaps even a little eerie. You and I both know that for more than twenty years now, I’ve struggled for with massive headaches and memory problems as a result of post-concussion syndrome and then further far-reaching physical and neurological traumatic brain injury and PTSD as a result of my time at with the fine folks at NASCAR. It’s common knowledge hat I commonly couldn’t remember entire shows which I’d written, produced, and edited. (On more than one occasion this had included projects which I’d later gone on to win an Emmy Award as well as earn numerous Emmy nominations.)

But there’s a world of difference between forgetting things and remembering incorrectly. And I remember seeing Max Crosby’s name somewhere along the way.

I distinctly remember the name “Max Crosby” because “Maxx Crosby” is the name of the outstanding defensive end for the NFL’s Las Vegas Raiders. Crosby played high school football Texas at Colleyville Heritage High just outside of Dallas, Texas, but spent his college football career playing for Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti — about a half-hour drive down I-94 from my hometown of Dearborn.

Nevertheless, even though Charlotte also tried to find some evidence that Max Crosby had read/reacted to A Tale of Two Aarons, she, like me, also came up empty.

It’s not as though I have some grandiose notion that somehow I’m the reason he decided to do what he did. I’m just not all that influential a fellow.

Instead, I kinda suspect that the biggest reason I became a little bit fixated on finding Max Crosby’s digital fingerprints was because I was haunted by the question: Was this a case in which a fellow Human Being might’ve put actual forethought into their decision to not only take their own life, but to do so in one of the most gruesome ways imaginable for any human being to die. The concept of that had been… well, almost offensive — if there even is a word suitable to describe such a thing.

I reckon I’d found myself thinking about Max Crosby’s self-immolation because the concept seemed so utterly foreign… so utterly inhuman… so utterly unlike the way in which I’d felt.

Even though  I was surprised by the inner calm I’d felt when things were looking dark and precarious for me just a few day ago, I was nevertheless not at all surprised by the singular determination to overcome the Dark Times.

I mean, just because you make it to the Super Bowl, that doesn’t mean you’re not gonna keep fighting like hell in order to win it.

I’ll readily admit that“Win What?” was the question. And even though it was a question which at the time I didn’t have the answer, I nevertheless never doubted what the answer would need to look like.

— And I sure as heck knew that any answer would require me to show my work.

So it’s still way too early for me to break the fourth wall, talk directly to into the camera, and tell you some upbeat “all’s well that end’s well” line then go back to chopping wood without a shirt on while some upbeat classic rock tune like Journey’s “Only the Young” slowly comes up in the background and the camera pans back and widens out into a wide shot of the Appalachian and Blue Ridge Mountains.

But alas, there can be no shirtless lumberjacking when there’s still the matter of having been caught with my Levis 511 pants down.

NOTES:

Burke, Chris. “Eastern Michigan's Maxx Crosby, on the long road between a dream and reality.” The Athletic. Feb. 26, 2019. (https://theathletic.com/836705/2019/02/26/eastern-michigans-maxx-crosby-on-the-long-road-between-a-dream-and-reality/)

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This is a little unexpected…

I’m writing this while laying in the hospital. I was moved up from the ER because I guess I might be here for a minute.

My kidneys are kinda failing for no apparent reason other than some serious dehydration.

But that’s not the really concerning part. The really concerning part is that my blood pressure just keeps on dropping and they’re not sure why or how to stop it.

(Probably a poor choice of words: “how to stop it.”)

It just keeps dropping. At some point, the heart won’t be able to pump enough blood to allow organ function.

Yeah: this is really happening.

BP is 69/48 at the moment (10:15am on Wednesday, May 8th.)

My vision’s feels like I’m seeing the world in sonar, so I’m not gonna write much.

Plus I don’t want it to read like literary drunk dialing.

This ain’t some “whoa is me.” I don’t want your sympathy. Set that aside for the little ones.

No, I’m writing because I’m a little surprised at how much I’m not worried and not feeling sorry for myself.

There’s something greater than us.

And that’s pretty great.

If this ends up going all the way south, so be it. If it’s time, it’s time,

I believe in Our Lord. And, I believe you’re under no obligation to feel the same. In fact, you have every right not to agree,

Heck, I didn’t realize until last night just where I stood. And it’s not because I’m scared; it’s because I’m not scared. Come to find out, realizing I stand with Him turned out to be kind of a no-brained. A matter of faith, if you will.

I’m grateful for that comfort right now.

So if I see y’all again (and let’s not get too melodramatic: I have a high degree of confidence that I will) then I’ll see you when I see you.

If this ends badly, it’s not a bad thing.

Either way, at least I learned where I stand.

And I know He stands with me.

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It’s one thing to be disabled.

It’s another thing to come to terms with it.

And it’s something else altogether to forgive yourself for it.

I’ve been thinking that any day now it’s gonna happen: I’ll knock the rust off and I’ll be back to my old self — knocking out 30 pages a day with relative ease.

Then I’ll write the wittiest of things using oh so impressive research abilities and bing-bang-boom: in just a matter of days, I’ll build my paid subscribers to tens of thousands of dollars per month!

— Or so I’ve been telling myself… for the past year.

But the thing is? It ain’t gonna happen. Not like that. Not anymore.

And the worst part?

That really sucks.

It’s not fun anymore either.

So I’m a little bit blue.

And that’s when, late last night, my Wife and our youngest son stole out to our writer’s workshop/storage shed.

When we lost our house years ago, and we were carrying everything out to the curb because we couldn’t take hardly anything with us, I personally packed all of my Emmy Awards, and all of my Emmy Nomination plaques, personally carried them outside, and personally dumped them all in the giant dumpster the good folks at the bank were were kind enough to rent for us for 24 hours because that’s how long we had to get the f*ck out.

What I didn’t know was that sometime around the Witching Hour, the kids took it upon themselves to scale up and over and into the dumpster and retrieve whatever Emmy Awards they could find.

Several months ago, when we finished the writer’s workshop, the Wife and the boys went back down to Charlotte, loaded up all the stuff they’d secretly been storing this whole time, and brought it up here. Thus, the writer’s workshop became the storage shed.

F*ck it: it’s for the best. We’ll get more use out of it this way.

But last night, while I went on my nightly hike with Hummer and Kona (our rescued retired Malinois military combat K-9s), the fam went out to the shed and brought in those Emmy Awards — along with my prized concert poster from the when former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters, along with a who’s who of bands performed “The Wall” live in front of the Berlin Wall in the summer of 1990. At the end of the concert, the actual Berlin Wall was brought down.

When I came home, there were the Emmy Awards, lined up and looking at me.

Two of the awards didn’t make it out of the dumpster. (Of course they were the two that were awarded for individual categories: Outstanding Writing and Outstanding Editing.) None of the nomination plaques survived.

They can’t be replaced. It’s not like you can just log on and reorder new ones. If one gets broke, you can send it back and they’ll repair/replace it. Otherwise, too bad.

Whatever.

There’s something to be said about seeing something that you haven’t seen since the President Obama was still in office and you didn’t expect to ever see again.

I never really appreciated them all that much until now. I’m a competitor; what I cared about most after winning the last one was winning the next.

But all these years later, it’s kind of cool seeing the surviving Emmy Awards lined up and realizing with the benefit of hindsight that not too many people can say they did that.

It’s a nostalgia-induced gravitas that makes you grateful that God granted you reprisal for a mistake that up until that moment you hadn’t realized you’d made.

So if I can’t write the same anymore? Whatever. We’ve overcome a lot worse.

Looking at them now, I guess maybe I did okay. I guess maybe I can let it go.

Maybe my days of being able to knock out enough to make a paid subscription worthwhile is a thing of the past.

And maybe I’m done running from that past.

So I’ll write what I write and it’ll take as long it takes to write it.

But I’m sure as heck not going to waste any more time chasing ghosts.

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When extreme acts are puzzling, every piece can be a puzzle unto itself.

If he is to be believed, this is how Aaron Bushnell wanted to be remembered.

It’s an image of horror.

It’s an image of madness.

It’s an image of a young man who wanted that one horror to bring an end to the horror suffered by many.

If Aaron Bushnell hadn’t set himself on fire last month standing in the driveway of the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C., then six weeks from now he’d be a guy with with an honorable discharge from the United States Air Force, cyber operations skills the kind of which could’ve taken him just about anywhere… and a cat.

Instead, US Air Force Senior Airman Aaron Bushnell chose to livestream his exit from this world just before 1:00pm on the afternoon of Sunday, February 25, 2024.

Barely a month later, you’ll probably already find that there's fewer people today who’d recognize the name “Aaron Bushnell” than there were yesterday.

To be sure, a fraction of people appeared to go straight to work manufacturing a budget-friendly psyop aimed at discrediting his name and repainting his life in smearing brushstrokes, reframing him as a terrorist sympathizer or a terrorist himself.

Another slightly larger slice of the minority made little to no effort to hide their effusiveness. Whether they were aware of what they were doing or not, they nevertheless seemed to hold Aaron up as a White Saviour of sorts, imbuing his act of mortal suffering with equal or greater value than the tens of thousands of Palestinians whose deaths were delivered by divine hand or Israeli forces depending on your point of view.

But for most of us, we reacted with bewilderment.

And the search for answers yielded mostly opinion.

The extent of most media efforts to “try and understand what happened” seemed to consist almost literally of little more than asking aloud the question “why?” before interviewing a a couple people who “didn’t really know him all that well,” or “used to be really close but then out of nowhere he just stopped talking to me,” followed by a sassy wrap-up line that includes asking “why?” one last time for dramatic effect.

And with that, the cause of the event is determined to be “puzzling,” then we add it to the pile where it can take its place as one more piece for the next puzzle.

Every once in a while, we might blame popular culture in some wild-handed sweeping declaration sort of way.

Or we’ll blame in its entirety some individual gear that grinds our Modern Times:

Orange Man ● Yellowcake —

Smart Phone —

Phone Home —

K-Pop, TicTok ● Tupac,

Columbine, Columbian Coke,

South Central ● South Park —

MTV ● Elvis’ Pelvis…

And the list is about as long as Elvis’ d—

…uh, Elves. Santa’s Elves. They keep a list. Real NSA-type sh*t.

Every one one of those subjects need only one or two words to tell an entire chapter in the story — the STORY — that is the ever-evolving history of our culture.

So why so rarely do we consider how popular culture is paramount to our reasoning — even though it’s paramount in our lives?

Heck, even the word “Paramount” conjures an image that's a part of popular culture.

The study of Popular Culture has historically been considered a lowbrow affair.

Why? Because “Popular Culture” sounds venomously close to “populism” and  our history must be kept under exclusive lockbox and license to academia at all times?

We are the products of our own pop culture.

We want to believe that the fate of Aaron Bushnell was an act of Divinity.

But that doesn’t help us piece together the puzzle.

Aaron’s story may initially read like a scrim-scram of pastiche moments which when puzzled together creates a mosaic that brings into focus this picture of a tragic life.

1. AARON

“acebush1” was USAF Senior Airman Aaron Bushnell, a “cyber defense operations specialist” (AFSC 1D7X1 - CFETP) assigned to the 531^st ISR Squadron (ACC); 543^rd ISR Group; 70^th ISR Wing; 16^th Air Force.

While the 531^st Intelligence Squadron (ACC) is stationed at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland AFB in Texas, the 70^th ISR Wing HQ is located at Fort Meade, Maryland.

Reports in the immediate aftermath initially placed Aaron at San Antonio-Lackland.

According to New York Magazine writer Matt Steib, a number of Aaron’s friends reportedly recalled that he’d recently spent time near Akron, Ohio in a program that helped USAF personnel with the transition from military life back into the civilian world.

It was eventually reported that Bushnell had been ultimately ended his life on assignment directly to the 70^th ISR Wing HQ at Fort Meade.

That’s worth noting, because also based at Fort Meade appears to be the National Security Agency, or NSA.

Fort Meade also happens to be about a 40-minute drive from the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C.

Standing on the mainstream side of the road, Aaron has been characterized as an enigmatic figure whose act of self-immolation was clearly indicative of an obviously mentally disturbed individual whose decisions and motivations are far too puzzling ever be understood. This appears to be evidenced in the way in which many members of the mainstream may have considered it pointless to point out his final words: “Free Palestine."

Surveying the scene from the other side of the road, Aaron’s actions, as horrifying as it may have been, and as inappropriate as it may seem to admit, could’ve conjured up pop culture memories inspired by something else as well: Jackass.

Debuting on MTV on the 1^st of October in the year 2000, Jackass lasted just 25 episodes over the course of three seasons. (Four further feature films from the franchise followed forthwith; fueling fortunes and future flights of fancy.

Nevertheless, Jackass shaped the imagination of mostly the young White males of America who henceforth seemed all to eager to emulate the legendary stunts of self-harm and Grossology which became the show’s hallmark.

Jackass was dark roast cringe comedy. It wasn’t “Must See TV,” as it was, “Dude, You Totally Missed It.”

The infamous “vomlette” was slated to be the opening stunt for the third season of the seminal MTV series, Jackass. The decision to censor it is believed to be what prompted the series’ creator, Johnny Knoxville, to end the show after an abbreviated third and final run.

In this story at least, it’s easy to see that the egg came before the chicken.

The last episode of Jackass aired on February 17, 2002. And somewhere between the time when the “Vomlette” sketch didn’t exactly go “over easy” with network censors and caused the suits at MTV to ‘throw-up’ their hands in disgust; and the NyQuil Chicken Challenge on TikTok ran “a-fowl” of the FDA and left lawmakers crying ‘fowl’, there’ve been myriad homages to the spirit of Jackass which often appear to more -or-less correspond with the high water marks of 4Chan, Reddit, Something Awful, and other websites of similar ilk.

What made Jackass (arguably) great wasn’t necessarily its sophomoric humor. It was the way in which incredibly skilled stunt people somehow managed to turn passive observers into active participants. That’s what had the potential to (occasionally) elevate Jackass from boorish to brilliant.

Yet in its ill-fated attempt to remain evergreen relevant, the show started to seem more and more like a race to the bottom of the barrel. It was a combination of cringe and caution thrown to the wind.

This dearth of death-loving stunts capable of inspiring young minds hellbent on inviting the world to witness their own self-destruction. And this is in spite of the fact that the number of online outlets available to air these masochistic antics have seemingly become legion.

And so I would respectfully submit that if the original series had been allowed to continue its progression toward its natural conclusion, the final stunt may have looked like something darkly familiar to Aaron Bushnell’s act of self-immolation.

I understand that the mere suggestion of this notion violates the contemporary norms of our present moral hierarchy, that’s the whole idea.

When Bushnell suicided by setting himself on fire, it was both horrifying and, thanks to members of law enforcement, replete with comedic undertones.

Although it was almost unquestionably unintentional, Aaron Bushnell’s choice to livestream his own self-murder in one of the most horrific ways known to man harkened back to the evening shade of cable television and the gone-in-the-blink-of-an-eye strangled-in-the-womb optimistic nostalgia of Y2K America.

And had Aaron’s act been ‘performed’ on Jackass, it very well might’ve stirred more moral outrage greater than the act itself. Yeah: this probably makes no sense. But when it’s true, it doesn’t have to make sense.

Hell, it doesn’t even have to be palatable.

Dressed in his “tiger stripes” fatigues that are the customary uniform of the Air Force enlisted ranks and holding his phone toward himself, Bushnell, who’s just ten weeks away from the end of his four-year enlistment, walks up the driveway of the Israeli embassy in Washington DC. He tells his small smattering of followers who’ve logged in to watch  him on the gaming site Twitch that he’s there to “engage in an extreme act of protest.”

Twitch, a subsidiary of Amazon, is dedicated primarily to the gaming community. It’s a site where gamers can livestream themselves competing against or campaigning alongside one another.

Bushnell had gone by the username acebush1. But on the day of his death, he changed it to LillyAnarKitty. And on this day, Aaron played the game a different way.

Except… You’d have thought it would’ve gone without saying that one mustn’t yeet one’s self via Twitch.

Bushnell hadn’t left much time for word of what he’s about to do to make its way through the social media pipeline. It’s only been a few hours since Bushnell posted to Facebook:

"Many of us like to ask ourselves, 'What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?' The answer is, you're doing it. Right now.”

Bushnell had reportedly emailed a mass-message to several media outlets as well. Apparently, what he’d written had been essentially that same thing he says during his livestream: "Today, I am planning to engage in an extreme act of protest against the genocide of the Palestinian people.”

It seems almost certain that virtually all the emails to the media Bushnell had sent would go unopened and/or dismissed, and/or otherwise ignored until after the fact. No matter how small most media outlets are, even the most irrelevant usually tend to treat anyone without a brand recognition name as repugnantly irrelevant and beneath the dignity of a response. It’s just one of myriad reasons why journalism as a whole is largely considered to be undeserving of credibility by most Americans.

Now, Bushnell halts in front of the Israeli embassy. He sets his cell phone down on the cement driveway so that he’s framed and in focus. He backs up several paces away the phone and closer to the front gates.

He removes his cover (military term for “hat”), and produces small a container. Inside is an accelerant of some kind. On the outside is a sticker that reads “The Bees Are Happy.” It a phrase familiar to players of the online game Valheim.

He pours the contents of “The Bees Are Happy” container over his ‘buzz-cut’ hair.

After replacing his cover, he shouted “Free Palestine!” Then, for all the world to see, Aaron Bushnell set himself alight.

Amid the chaos that followed, Bushnell somehow managed to repeat “Free Palestine!” again and again before the flames finally overcame any conscious awareness and he collapsed onto the embassy’s cement driveway where once a human being stood.

In the true spirit of social media exhibitionism, Aaron Bushnell’s gesture was as much Jackass as Justice Department; as much Fellinious as felonious.

Fellnious /fell-ē-nē-us/ adj. 1: to be Fellini-like, fellini-esque. Named for Italian film director Federico Fellini who became famous for his films which would often seamlessly incorporate a combination of reality and the ridiculous.

Perhaps the most Fellinious moment of the livestream occurs after Bushnell has ignited himself and is somehow willing himself to remain standing when a someone clad entirely in tactical black and later reported to be a member of the U.S. Secret Service emerges into view. He's holds his sidearm pointed at Bushnell while screaming “Down on the ground! Get down on the ground!”

Seriously, what kind of asshole classes was this guy ordered to attend in which it’s taught that the appropriate course of action when confronted with someone who’s literally on fire is to arrest that person?

“Book ‘em, Danno.”

Pointing a handgun at a man who’s man on fire and screaming, “Get on the ground! Get on the ground!” is so very close, yet so so very much not the same as “Stop, Drop, and Roll” that it turned that man into exactly what he is: a joke.

Bushnell’s last words were imbued with impossible-to-miss political overtones borne from the ceaseless humanitarian atrocities unfolding day-after-day in Gaza.

Just as it so often is IRL (“In Real Life”), the moment scars our psyche on a strata of levels. It's haunting, horrifying, enraging, titillating, terrifying, tragic, ridiculous, and yes, gallows humor.

hysterical (adj.) /hys· ter· i· cal/ 1. uncontrollably emotional. 2. irrational from fear, emotion, or an emotional shock. 3. causing unrestrained laughter; very funny.

It turns out that shocking the world may be a bit like drug addiction. Tolerance increases evermore. An act that shocks the world this time also compounds to inhibit the effects of that act. This happens a little more each time with every subsequent act. Eventually, taking a dose so great that it would otherwise kill a normal person is the only way the addict can feel somewhere close to normal.

Think about it like this:

In June of 1963, a Buddhist monk called Thích Quảng Đức set himself on fire in the middle of a busy traffic intersection in downtown Saigon.

A photographer named Malcolm Brown captured the moment and as a result was recognized with the Pulitzer Prize as well as World Press Photo of the Year.

Contradictory to popular belief, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident was still fourteen months away, so Quảng Đức’s act of self-immolation wasn’t performed as a protest to U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam War.

More than six decades later, this photo remains one of the iconic images of the soul engulfing insanity that recast the American Spirit as an unwilling nation forced by its own hand to plunge deeper into its never-to-be-defined-role in Southeast Asia.

Less than six weeks since his death, the legacy of Aaron Bushnell’s gesture may amount to little more than a decision by Israel to start putting orange traffic cones in its embassy driveways in an attempt to prevent history from repeating itself.

“Expert opinion” (quotation marks used for sake of sarcasm) seem divided between those who consider Aaron a Bushnell to be either a “terrorist” or a “martyr.”

Few folks have been shy about saying which side of that debate they fall on. But a lot of those same folks tend to list at the top of their criteria for determining whether or not something should be declared an act of martyrdom is whether or not they declared themselves to be in agreement with the actor.

A “martyr” might also be characterized as someone who’s forced to endure severe hardships and torment, and/or someone who’s murdered because of their religious or political beliefs and is later exalted because they remained faithful to their cause in spite of what they were forced to experience.

“Martyr,” from the Greek word martus signifies a witness who testifies to a fact of which he has knowledge from personal observation.

And Senior Airman Bushnell may very well have had knowledge of certain facts by having personally witnessed and observed them.

I’ll say this for the Aaron: had that experience been forced on me, I’d probably have opted for a cocktail of morphine, nembutal, novocaine, lidocaine and Solarcaine delivered in such a lethal dose that I might’ve ended up at the mall, lighting up in front of the clothing store “Bebe” because in those drug addled final moments I misread it as “Bibi.”

But if you’re going to end your life as a form of protest for the sake of a certain people, it’s probably a good idea to first check to see if that the gesture isn’t something that may be strictly prohibited according to the tenets of those people’s religious faith.

In Islam, it’s considered haraam — expressly forbidden — to set a human being on fire. And that includes one’s self.

The Prophet Mohammed (blessings and peace of Allah be upon him) said: “No one punishes with fire except Allah.” Therefore, according to Islamic teachings, Aaron's act could very well be considered to have been haraam.

On the other side of the road, if Aaron may have believed that his act would somehow shock Israel back to humanity, his faith appears to have been misplaced.

As callous as this may sound, Israel’s reaction instead appeared to go beyond just absolute apathy. Rumors quickly became reporting as Aaron was soon appeared to be disparaged by assorted members within mainstream media as an antisemitic, anarchist, communist, White nationalist, religiously radical terrorist. The evidence was soon debunked; but not soon enough.

Still, when it requires fabricated evidence to support false accusations because facts and evidence suggest otherwise, that doesn’t bode well for posterity.

Even as the world seemed to be drawn to Aaron’s story like a moth drawn to the flame, few seemed enlightened to the understanding that when Aaron found himself standing in front of the Israeli embassy four weeks ago, he almost certainly never would’ve predicted four years ago when he made the decision to enlist in the U.S. Air Force that his life would end as a man of fire live-streaming his own death on the driveway of a foreign embassy.

On March 19, 2020, just a few days after the Covid-19 Pandemic plunged America into a nationwide lockdown, a Reddit user called acebush1 posted that they were trying to find work as an Uber Eats driver.

The following month acebush1 posted:

HELP – Can’t get stimulus or unemployment benefits, about to run out of money.

Shortly thereafter, acebush1 — IRL Aaron Bushnell — joined the U.S. Air Force.

There’s an image I find myself returning to; and each time it breaks my heart…

It was the sticker that Aaron had placed on one of his containers sometime ago before he ever could’ve known that one day he’d be be filling that container with an accelerant and bringing it along to the Israeli embassy.

“The Bees Are Happy.”

When someone’s actions so absolutely flies in the face of all reason, it’s usually in our nature to look for a way to make sense of the senseless.

Since his death, Aaron has been labeled a terrorist, communist, cultist, anarchist, and assorted other “-ists” he’s apparently been labeled with.

Aaron was reportedly raised in the “Community of Jesus,” located in Rock Harbor on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. There have been allegations that the non-denominational Christian community of about 300 members should be considered a cult.

Some of those reports however, appear to confuse the “Community of Jesus” with an offshoot of traditional Mormonism that calls itself the “Community of Christ” of the RLDS (“Recognized Church of Latter Day Saints”).

Contrary to other allegations, it doesn’t appear that Aaron was schooled within the “Community of Jesus.” Nor is it believed that he was he indoctrinated in the tenets of Christian Nationalism or Fundamentalism.

Instead, evidence appears to show that Aaron received a public school education in the Nauset Public School District. A student named Aaron Bushnell is reported to have attended Orleans Elementary School between 2003 and 2007 and Nauset Regional High School from 2013 until his graduation in 2016.

That being said, the social engineering of a public school education can result in lasting problems of a different nature. The experience has been alleged to be analogous to institutionalized behavioral programming techniques that have been reported by incarcerated prisoner populations.

Another claim that has come into question are reports that Aaron was quote-unquote “banished” from the order of the Community of Jesus. Evidence instead appears to show that he left home in 2019 in order to experience the “real world.”

But instead of experiencing the “real world” away from the Church, Aaron was instead confronted with an un-real world-wide pandemic of biblical proportions.

By all accounts, Aaron was a good kid. He was a quiet kid with a love of computer science and the writings of C.S. Lewis. One of the last books he’s believed to have read was Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (2015).

Nor do his political or personal beliefs need to be defended. The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution Aaron upheld his oath to defend does that already.

Aaron was, like so many other members of Generation Z, fighting to find himself and find his way until he was instead drafted into Generation Covid. Then, finding he had nowhere left to turn and no family left to turn to, he found the only path left open to him was enlistment in the service of Uncle Sam.

If we were still that shining nation upon a hill, guided by our Better Angels, maybe Aaron’s story might’ve ended differently.

But we aren’t. And it didn’t.

One year before his death, in February of 2023, Aaron wrote:

“I view enforced homelessness as a societal failing and a crime against humanity. I believe that no one deserves to be deprived of basic human necessities. I believe that homelessness as an involuntary condition must be abolished.”

Aaron’s story may be all the more tragic by the fact that he was only a few months away from receiving an Honorable Discharge from the Air Force.

Or maybe, that may be one of the few things that makes sense in this otherwise senseless story.

Imagine what it must have felt like; knowing that you were about to be turned out back into the same world you escaped from four years earlier, only to realize that four year later, the world you’d thought you’d escaped from instead looks almost exactly the same.

…And the signs are near-absolute-zero that anything will be any different in 2024 from how it was in 2020.

The feeling may not be so uncommon.

For whatever reason it seems to have gone largely unnoticed that a disproportionate number of school shootings take place with only a few months remaining until the end of the school year.

Even more perplexing, many of those shooters are graduating seniors.

We may never know if there’s a relationship between institutionalized public school violence and public school educated Aaron Bushnell’s decision to end his life by self-immolation despite the end of his enlistment being so close that he’d already attended training in Akron, Ohio to help ease his transition back into a civilian world that may have looked as hopeless as it had four years before.

Maybe someday, someone in charge will notice.

Maybe someday.

Someday the apocalypse itself will be live-streamed.

But not today.

Today, up where the Appalachian Mountains of Western North Carolina meet the North Georgia Blue Ridge Mountains, it’s a good day.

On this day, Good Friday, the world feels alive with a sense of Devine Reawakening. A winter on fire gives way to the phoenix of spring. The world is reborn. Life returns; as if riding upon a donkey (or “Jackass,” if you will) of cherry blossom Easter White.

On this day, the Son is shining.

The creek waters are flowing.

Our dogs dance in the field.

The birds are singing.

The Bees are Happy.

ENDNOTES:

Bogel-Burroughs, Nicholas & Colbi Edmonds, Colbi, “U.S. Airman’s Winding Path Ended in Self-Immolation to Protest Israel.” New York Times. Feb. 28, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/us/aaron-bushnell-israel-embassy-fire.html)

Legere, Christine. “Airman’s Death is Both a Protest and a Loss.” The Provincetown Independence. March 6, 2024. (https://provincetownindependent.org/tag/aaron-bushnell/)

Novelly, Thomas. “Air Force Identifies 25-Year-Old Cyber Specialist as Airman Who Set Himself on Fire in Front of DC Embassy.” Military.com. Feb. 27, 2024. (https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/02/27/airman-who-set-himself-fire-outside-israeli-embassy-was-cyber-specialist-fort-meade.html)

Steib, Matt. “What We Know About the Man Who Self-Immolated in Front of the Israeli Embassy.” New York Magazine. The Intelligencer. March 5. 2024. (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/aaron-bushnell-self-immolation-what-we-know.html)

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Chronic trauma tears us apart. We break into tribes and feel our identities shatter. Without words for unspeakable horror, we try to make sense of the madness however we can.

Even with 2024 being a leap year, it’s only been a little over a month since US Air Force Senior Airman Aaron Bushnell will elect to livestream his exit from this world just before 1:00pm on the afternoon of Sunday, February 25, 2024.

Nevertheless, there seems to be fewer people today who’d recognize the name today than there’d been yesterday.

Aaron, whose online name was acebush1, was a “cyber defense operations specialist” (AFSC 1D7X1 - CFETP1). He was assigned to the 531^st ISR2 Squadron (ACC); 543^rd ISR Group; 70^th ISR Wing; 16^th Air Force.

While the 531^st Intelligence Squadron (ACC) is stationed at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland AFB in Texas, the 70^th ISR Wing HQ is located at Fort Meade, Maryland.

Reports initially placed Airman Bushnell at San Antonio-Lackland.

According to New York Magazine writer Matt Steib, Aaron’s friends believed he’d been assigned for a period of time near Akron, Ohio while transitioning from military life back into the civilian world.

It’s also now known that Bushnell was reportedly assigned directly to the 70^th ISR Wing HQ at Fort Meade.

That’s worth noting, because also based at Fort Meade appears to be the National Security Agency, or NSA.

Oh, and Fort Meade also happens to be about a 40-minute drive from the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C.

On one side of the road, Bushnell appears painted in smearing brushstrokes that have recast him as an antisemitic radical. But when a person or group needs to fabricate evidence to support their assertion because there’s no other evidence to support it, that’s a problem.

Looking at the scene from the other side of the road, I was reminded of Jackass.

Debuting on MTV on the 1^st of October in the year 2000, Jackass lasted just 25 episodes over the course of three seasons. (Four further feature films from the franchise followed forthwith; fueling fortunes and future flights of fancy.

Nevertheless, Jackass shaped the imagination of mostly the young White males of America who henceforth seemed all to eager to emulate the legendary stunts of self-harm and Grossology which became the show’s hallmark.

Jackass was dark roast cringe comedy. It wasn’t “Must See TV,” as it was, “Dude, You Totally Missed It.”

The infamous “vomlette” was slated to be the opening stunt for the third season of the seminal MTV series, Jackass. The decision to censor it is believed to be what prompted the series’ creator, Johnny Knoxville, to end the show after an abbreviated third and final run.

In this story at least, it’s easy to see that the egg came before the chicken.

The last episode of Jackass aired on February 17, 2002. And somewhere between the time when the “Vomlette” sketch didn’t exactly go “over easy” with network censors and caused the suits at MTV to ‘throw-up’ their hands in disgust; and the NyQuil Chicken Challenge on TikTok ran “a-fowl” of the FDA and left lawmakers crying ‘fowl’, there’ve been myriad homages to the spirit of Jackass which often appear to more -or-less correspond with the high water marks of 4Chan, Reddit, Something Awful, and other websites of similar ilk.

What made Jackass (arguably) great wasn’t necessarily its sophomoric humor. It was the way in which incredibly skilled stunt people somehow managed to turn passive observers into active participants. That’s what had the potential to (occasionally) elevate Jackass from boorish to brilliant.

Yet in its ill-fated attempt to remain evergreen relevant, the show started to seem more and more like a race to the bottom of the barrel. It was a combination of cringe and caution thrown to the wind.

This dearth of death-loving stunts capable of inspiring young minds hellbent on inviting the world to witness their own self-destruction. And this is in spite of the fact that the number of online outlets available to air these masochistic antics have seemingly become legion.

And so I would respectfully submit that if the original series had been allowed to continue its progression toward its natural conclusion, the final stunt may have looked like something darkly familiar to Aaron Bushnell’s act of self-immolation.

I understand that the mere suggestion of this notion violates the contemporary norms of our present moral hierarchy, that’s the whole idea.

When Bushnell suicided by setting himself on fire, it was both horrifying and, thanks to members of law enforcement, replete with comedic undertones.

Although it was almost unquestionably unintentional, Aaron Bushnell’s choice to livestream his own self-murder in one of the most horrific ways known to man harkened back to the evening shade of cable television and the gone-in-the-blink-of-an-eye strangled-in-the-womb optimistic nostalgia of Y2K America.

And had Aaron’s act been ‘performed’ on Jackass, it very well might’ve stirred more moral outrage greater than the act itself. Yeah: this probably makes no sense. But when it’s true, it doesn’t have to make sense.

Hell, it doesn’t even have to be palatable.

Dressed in his “tiger stripes” fatigues that are the customary uniform of the Air Force enlisted ranks and holding his phone toward himself, Bushnell, who’s just ten weeks away from the end of his four-year enlistment, walks up the driveway of the Israeli embassy in Washington DC. He tells his small smattering of followers who’ve logged in to watch  him on the gaming site Twitch that he’s there to “engage in an extreme act of protest.”

Twitch, a subsidiary of Amazon, is dedicated primarily to the gaming community. It’s a site where gamers can livestream themselves competing against or campaigning alongside one another.

Bushnell had gone by the username acebush1. But on the day of his death, he changed it to LillyAnarKitty. And on this day, Aaron played the game a different way.

Except… You’d have thought it would’ve gone without saying that one mustn’t yeet one’s self via Twitch.

Bushnell hadn’t left much time for word of what he’s about to do to make its way through the social media pipeline. It’s only been a few hours since Bushnell posted to Facebook:

"Many of us like to ask ourselves, 'What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?' The answer is, you're doing it. Right now.”

Bushnell had reportedly emailed a mass-message to several media outlets as well. Apparently, what he’d written had been essentially that same thing he says during his livestream: "Today, I am planning to engage in an extreme act of protest against the genocide of the Palestinian people.”

It seems almost certain that virtually all the emails to the media Bushnell had sent would go unopened and/or dismissed, and/or otherwise ignored until after the fact. No matter how small most media outlets are, even the most irrelevant usually tend to treat anyone without a brand recognition name as repugnantly irrelevant and beneath the dignity of a response. It’s just one of myriad reasons why journalism as a whole is largely considered to be undeserving of credibility by most Americans.

Now, Bushnell halts in front of the Israeli embassy. He sets his cell phone down on the cement driveway so that he’s framed and in focus. He backs up several paces away the phone and closer to the front gates.

He removes his cover (military term for “hat”), and produces small a container. Inside is an accelerant of some kind. On the outside is a sticker that reads “The Bees Are Happy.” It a phrase familiar to players of the online game Valheim.

He pours the contents of “The Bees Are Happy” container over his ‘buzz-cut’ hair.

After replacing his cover, he shouted “Free Palestine!” Then, for all the world to see, Aaron Bushnell set himself alight.

Amid the chaos that followed, Bushnell somehow managed to repeat “Free Palestine!” again and again before the flames finally overcame any conscious awareness and he collapsed onto the embassy’s cement driveway where once a human being stood.

In the true spirit of social media exhibitionism, Aaron Bushnell’s gesture was as much Jackass as Justice Department; as much Fellinious as felonious.

Fellnious /fell-ē-nē-us/ adj. 1: to be Fellini-like, fellini-esque. Named for Italian film director Federico Fellini who became famous for his films which would often seamlessly incorporate a combination of reality and the ridiculous.

Perhaps the most Fellinious moment of the livestream occurs after Bushnell has ignited himself and is somehow willing himself to remain standing when a someone clad entirely in tactical black and later reported to be a member of the U.S. Secret Service emerges into view. He's holds his sidearm pointed at Bushnell while screaming “Down on the ground! Get down on the ground!”

Seriously, what kind of asshole classes was this guy ordered to attend in which it’s taught that the appropriate course of action when confronted with someone who’s literally on fire is to arrest that person?

“Book ‘em, Danno.”

Pointing a handgun at a man who’s man on fire and screaming, “Get on the ground! Get on the ground!” is so very close, yet so so very much not the same as “Stop, Drop, and Roll” that it turned that man into exactly what he is: a joke.

Bushnell’s last words were imbued with impossible-to-miss political overtones borne from the ceaseless humanitarian atrocities unfolding day-after-day in Gaza.

Just as it so often is IRL (“In Real Life”), the moment scars our psyche on a strata of levels. It's haunting, horrifying, enraging, titillating, terrifying, tragic, ridiculous, and yes, gallows humor hilarious.

hysterical (adj.) /hys· ter· i· cal/ 1. uncontrollably emotional. 2. irrational from fear, emotion, or an emotional shock. 3. causing unrestrained laughter; very funny.

It turns out that shocking the world may be a bit like drug addiction. Tolerance increases evermore. An act that shocks the world this time also compounds to inhibit the effects of that act. This happens a little more each time with every subsequent act. Eventually, taking a dose so great that it would otherwise kill a normal person is the only way the addict can feel somewhere close to normal.

Think about it like this:

In June of 1963, a Buddhist monk called Thích Quảng Đức set himself on fire in the middle of a busy traffic intersection in downtown Saigon.

A photographer named Malcolm Brown captured the moment and as a result was recognized with the Pulitzer Prize as well as World Press Photo of the Year.

Contradictory to popular belief, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident was still fourteen months away, so Quảng Đức’s act of self-immolation wasn’t performed as a protest to U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam War.

More than six decades later, this photo remains one of the iconic images of the soul engulfing insanity that recast the American Spirit as an unwilling nation forced by its own hand to plunge deeper into its never-to-be-defined-role in Southeast Asia.

Less than six weeks since his death, the legacy of Aaron Bushnell’s gesture may amount to little more than a decision by Israel to start putting orange traffic cones in its embassy driveways in an attempt to prevent history from repeating itself.

“Expert opinion” (quotation marks used for sake of sarcasm) seem divided between those who consider Aaron a Bushnell to be either a “terrorist” or a “martyr.”

Few folks have been shy about saying which side of that debate they fall on. But a lot of those same folks tend to list at the top of their criteria for determining whether or not something should be declared an act of martyrdom is whether or not they declared themselves to be in agreement with the actor.

A “martyr” might also be characterized as someone who’s forced to endure severe hardships and torment, and/or someone who’s murdered because of their religious or political beliefs and is later exalted because they remained faithful to their cause in spite of what they were forced to experience.

“Martyr,” from the Greek word martus signifies a witness who testifies to a fact of which he has knowledge from personal observation.

And Senior Airman Bushnell may very well have had knowledge of certain facts by having personally witnessed and observed them.

I’ll say this for the Aaron: had that experience been forced on me, I’d probably have opted for a cocktail of morphine, nembutal, novocaine, lidocaine and Solarcaine delivered in such a lethal dose that I might’ve ended up at the mall, lighting up in front of the clothing store “Bebe” because in those drug addled final moments I misread it as “Bibi.”

But if you’re going to end your life as a form of protest for the sake of a certain people, it’s probably a good idea to first check to see if that the gesture isn’t something that may be strictly prohibited according to the tenets of those people’s religious faith.

In Islam, it’s considered haraam — expressly forbidden — to set a human being on fire. And that includes one’s self.

The Prophet Mohammed (blessings and peace of Allah be upon him) said: “No one punishes with fire except Allah.” Therefore, according to Islamic teachings, Aaron's act could very well be considered to have been haraam.

But despite there being  just so much tragedy linked to this story, it should be obvious by now to anyone who’s been drawn to Aaron’s story like a moth drawn to the flame, that in a story full of “whats,” what’s missing from the story is “why.”

Maybe that’s because four weeks ago, Aaron most likely found himself somewhere that four years ago he probably never would’ve expected himself to be.

On March 19, 2020, just a few days after the Covid-19 Pandemic plunged America into a nationwide lockdown, a Reddit user called acebush1 posted that they were trying to find work as an Uber Eats driver.

The following month acebush1 posted:

HELP – Can’t get stimulus or unemployment benefits, about to run out of money.

Shortly thereafter, acebush1 — IRL Aaron Bushnell — joined the U.S. Air Force.

There’s an image I find myself returning to; and each time it breaks my heart…

It was the sticker that Aaron had placed on one of his containers sometime ago before he ever could’ve known that one day he’d be be filling that container with an accelerant and bringing it along to the Israeli embassy.

“The Bees Are Happy.”

When someone’s actions so absolutely flies in the face of all reason, it’s usually in our nature to look for a way to make sense of the senseless.

Since his death, Aaron Bushnell has been labeled a terrorist, communist, cultist, anarchist, and assorted other “-ists” others have seemed compelled to throw at him.

He was apparently raised in the “Community of Jesus,” located in Rock Harbor on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. There have been reports alleging the non-denominational Christian community of about 300 members qualifies a cult. However, there are also nearly as many reports that confuse it with the “Community of Christ,” of the RLDS, or Recognized Church of Latter Day Saints — an offshoot of traditional Mormonism.

Furthermore, contrary to what’s been reported, Aaron wasn’t schooled in Christian Nationalism or Fundamentalism. Rather, he apparently attended public school up through graduation. According to the Nauset Public School District, Aaron attended Orleans Elementary School between 2003 and 2007 and Nauset Regional High School from 2013 until his graduation in 2016.

Nor, as has been reported, was he banished from the order of the Community of Jesus. He left home in 2019 in order to experience the “real world.”

But rather than experiencing the “real world” away from the Church, Aaron would instead experience was an unreal world-wide pandemic of biblical proportions.

By all accounts, he was a good kid. He was a quiet kid with a love of computer science and the writings of C.S. Lewis. One of the last books he’s believed to have read was Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (2015).

He was, like so many others, fighting to find himself and find his way until he was drafted into Generation Covid, and, finding he had nowhere left to turn and no family left to turn to, found himself enlisted in the service of Uncle Sam.

If we were still that shining nation upon a hill guided by our Better Angels, maybe Aaron’s story might’ve ended differently.

But we aren’t. And it didn’t.

One year before his death, in February of 2023, Aaron wrote:

“I view enforced homelessness as a societal failing and a crime against humanity. I believe that no one deserves to be deprived of basic human necessities. I believe that homelessness as an involuntary condition must be abolished.”

Aaron’s story may be all the more tragic by the fact that he was only a few months away from receiving an Honorable Discharge from the Air Force.

Or maybe, that may be one of the few things that makes sense in this otherwise senseless story.

Imagine what it must have felt like; knowing that you were about to be turned out back into the same world you escaped from four years earlier, only to realize that four year later, the world you’d thought you’d escaped from instead looks almost exactly the same.

…And the signs are near-absolute-zero that anything will be any different in 2024 from how it was in 2020.

It’s not uncommon.

Maybe someday, someone will finally happen to notice that just as Aaron acted a few months before the end of his enlistment, most school shootings take place a few months before the end of the school year; and most shooters are graduating seniors.

Maybe someday.

Someday the apocalypse itself will be live-streamed.

But not today.

Today, up where the Appalachian Mountains of Western North Carolina meet the North Georgia Blue Ridge Mountains, it’s a good day.

On this day, Good Friday, the world feels alive with a sense of Devine Reawakening. A winter on fire gives way to the phoenix of spring. The world is reborn. Life returns; as if riding upon a donkey (or “Jackass,” if you will) of cherry blossom Easter White.

On this day, the Son is shining.

The creek waters are flowing.

Our dogs dance in the field.

The birds are singing.

The Bees are Happy.

ENDNOTES:

Bogel-Burroughs, Nicholas & Colbi Edmonds, Colbi, “U.S. Airman’s Winding Path Ended in Self-Immolation to Protest Israel.” New York Times. Feb. 28, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/us/aaron-bushnell-israel-embassy-fire.html)

Legere, Christine. “Airman’s Death is Both a Protest and a Loss.” The Provincetown Independence. March 6, 2024. (https://provincetownindependent.org/tag/aaron-bushnell/)

Novelly, Thomas. “Air Force Identifies 25-Year-Old Cyber Specialist as Airman Who Set Himself on Fire in Front of DC Embassy.” Military.com. Feb. 27, 2024. (https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/02/27/airman-who-set-himself-fire-outside-israeli-embassy-was-cyber-specialist-fort-meade.html)

Steib, Matt. “What We Know About the Man Who Self-Immolated in Front of the Israeli Embassy.” New York Magazine. The Intelligencer. March 5. 2024. (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/aaron-bushnell-self-immolation-what-we-know.html)

I joined Substack over a year ago.

For all that time, there’s been one struggle that I’ve kept coming back to again and again: my name.

It’s comfortable hiding behind a nom de guerre. I can write what I want without fear of being trolled. I can also just exist without that same fear.

My story is a little different from most.

For the past decade I’ve been trolled by some truly terrible human beings. This included having numerous accounts, computers, and hard drives hacked. There’ve been a number of times where we’ve lost literally everything. Probably the hardest has been losing a lifetime of our family photos.

But the conundrum I’ve been dealing with is this: is it right to call out many of these people by name while continuing to hide behind an alias?

I don’t think it is. I never have. I’ve just been making excuses in order to rationalize it to myself.

On other sites? Sure. But on here, it feels different. I don’t know why. But it does.

I’ve also spent the last decade being ashamed of who I am. It’s victim self-shaming and I’ve been fully aware of that this whole time. But when you’ve spent so much time and so many years being gaslit, it’s tougher that I thought it was going to be.

But at this point, it’s begun to feel like an albatross.

I also feel like it’s letting off the hook those who I’ve called out by name.

I’ve lived some really weird sh*t. But just because it’s weird doesn’t mean it’s not true. Just because it may be alien to you doesn’t mean it’s not true.

Somehow, putting a nom de guerre on that feels like it’s Nerfing the experience.

It didn’t take much to make me realize that it was time to tear down The Wall.

It took one reader, Charlotte Pendragon. She looked into one of the worst human beings our family has ever known. It made me realize that calling him out while at the same time hiding behind a pen name felt a little cowardly all of a sudden.

That being said, this decision has also made me realize that I still have a really long way to go. But avoiding my own identity doesn’t seem to be helping one bit.

If I’m gonna own what I write then I should also own who I am. Am I ashamed of who I am, or am I ashamed that I’m a victim? If I’m ashamed that I’m a victim, then avoiding the “I” in that sentence isn’t going to help one bit. I need to get over myself. The injury is to my ego. It’s my inability — or my refusal — to accept that I can’t control my own existence; to accept that someone really shitty did something really shitty to me, to my family, and most importantly to our Daughter. And there’s not a goddamned thing I can do to fix reality.

She was my Daughter. Yes, she was also our Daughter. But she was my daughter.

I learned that a teammate always shares credit with their team. But trying to share shame may be more like trying to push your peas onto someone else’s plate.

It may also be like letting the assailant off the hook because you’re ashamed — I’m ashamed — of being a victim. I’m not ashamed of allowing myself to be a victim. I’m ashamed of being a victim. It’s part of my identity and I need to own it… the same as I need to own my identity.

There’s no point in trying to do something for reasons cathartic if you’re just going to shift yourself from one stress point into another.

Nor should we try to relieve that stress by shifting it onto someone else.

I saw an article today with all kinds of likes. It’s title was something about “people shouldn’t share mental secrets” or something like that.

I don’t remember who that writer was, but I do remember thinking maybe that writer should STFU. People can write about whatever the hell they need to write about (so long as their consenting it isn’t against the law). And if you don’t like it, that’s on you.

Ergo, if someone feels like they need to write about their mental health and you don’t like it? Don’t read it. If you read it and don’t like it? That’s on you.

Free speech is all about saying how people should be able to say what they want. That is, until someone says something that we don’t like.

I tend to carry the weight of the world on my shoulders. But somehow, this burden of feeling like a fraud because I’m not putting my name it seems to be weighing on me even more.

So, here I am.

My name is Shawn Truax.

I’ve lived a pretty amazing life.

And I’m more than a little tired of feeling ashamed of it.

Whether or not I choose to talk about any of it or share any of it is up to me.

Maybe I’ll tell you about going to Michigan to play quarterback or maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll tell you about being there at the same time as Tom Brady or maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll tell you about going to training camp in the NFL or maybe I’ll only reference it from time to time. Maybe I’ll tell you about how concussions ended my career or maybe that’s all that needs to be said.

Either way, it’s beginning to feel more than a little narcissistic to believe that I’m worth the time to troll. I’ve been feeling more than a little dishonest. What can I say? I’m a Boy Scout. (Actually, I was an Eagle Scout, as well as a Spaatz Cadet in the Civil Air Patrol.)

There are two kinds of wealth: Money and Memories.

We’ve experienced several lifetimes full of memories.

And we’ve got bills to pay.

All-in-All, I’ll take it.

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The Network was a zombie.

That’s what I remember thinking when we toured the PAC-12 Network facilities for the first time.

The PAC-12 was paying $700,000 per month in rent to set up shop in a corpse.

I remember how utterly uninhabited the building looked and felt.

On the occasion that we should happen upon another living soul, they felt as out of place as if an artist afflicted with psychopathy had inexplicably painted a person into his Black Hole Sun cityscape masterpiece.

“You see me too, right?” I remember asking one particularly nervous-looking fellow who'd happened by.

He didn’t answer.

If I were prognosticating based solely on the progress that had been made, I would’ve thought that it would still be months away before the Network was officially scheduled to go on the air.

I never would’ve guessed that they’d gone on the air a year ago almost to the day.

I remember walking past edit suite after edit suite that appeared unfinished.

In some cases, the drywall had already been put up.

In others, I was greeted by just the metallic skeleton framing.

In almost every case, the editing equipment was still in boxes. And a lot of those boxes were still unopened. Most were covered in sawdust and/or drywall powder.

I remember seeing what looked like literally millions of dollars in equipment that seemed to be just sitting there.

“Do You Like Rock & Roll, Pizza, and Good Times?” I remember muttering to myself.

I grew up in Dearborn Michigan — the birthplace of Henry Ford and home to the world headquarters of the Ford Motor Company. And it was at The Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village where I spent my summers as a steamboat pilot.

I was as a Ferryboat Frogger on board the Steamboat “Suwanee.”.

Standing at the helm of the Steamboat “Suwanee” was the closest I’d ever be able to get to following in the footsteps of American author and adventurer Mark Twain.

“Mark Twain” was, of course, the nom de guerre chosen by young Samuel Clemons.

It’s also a steamboater’s term. A “mark” is equal to a “fathom,” which is equal to six feet. So “mark twain” equals “two fathoms,” which equates to a depth of twelve feet.

“Mark Twain” was generally considered to be the minimum safe depth for a riverboat to travel. (For the record, I think that the deepest point in the Greenfield Village lagoon around which the “Suwanee” paddled visitors around several times per day was perhaps a little over four feet.)

Such is the piteousness of looking back when we realize that the best job we’d ever have paid only $9.50 an hour, and some of the best people we’d ever work with were either older than our grandparents or not old enough for us to buy beer.

There was Mary, who was an expat nude dancer in Paris before escaping across the English Channel just ahead of the German Wehrmacht.

And there was Jerry, whose life was saved by the atomic bombings of Japan because he was doomed to be among the first wave preparing to storm the Kantō Plain and Tokyo itself at the start of “Operation Downfall.”

And in our age-appropriate group There was Jeff, who had an internship working security at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta and actually worked with Richard Jewell on a number of occasions. He was also an architectural prodigy who graduated at the top of his class from the University of Detroit.  Jeff now lives over in Greenville, South Carolina where he heads up his own firm.

There were a pair of fellow steamboat pilots:

Jill graduated at the top of her class from Liberty University;

Dan (aka “Lieutenant Dan”) was a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Michigan who went on to study law at Harvard where he eventually become editor of the Harvard Law Review.

In 2007, as part of a documentary about the Darfur Crisis in Sudan, I interviewed a then-largely unknown U.S. Presidential candidate named Barack Obama who, like Dan, had also once been the editor of the Harvard Law Review. And yet as impressed by, and as much as I may have come to admire our future 44^th President, I nevertheless still believe that while Barack Obama may have been smart, he wasn’t “Lieutenant Dan” smart.

Between those generations of old and young there was Steve Hamp, the hands-on president of Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village who rose through the ranks like the rest of us, fell in love with Shiela before he knew her last name was Ford. Today the Hamps share hand-in-hand ownership of the resurgent Detroit Lions.

I’ve actually had the distinct pleasure and privilege to work for a pair of Steves: Steve Hamp, the president of The Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village and Steve Sabo, the president of NFL Films.

And the bridging those two experiences of a lifetime was, I believe, the vice-president in charge of Greenfield Village: Christian Øverland.

Christian’s effusive kindness and support was, the bridge that to learn under Steve Sabol at NFL Films. Between the time I left our interview near the ball room of Lovett Hall, and the time it took for me to drive home, Christian had already called home, praised me to my Mum, and asked her to tell me that I’d already gotten the job. In fact, I still keep in my dresser door the “Thank You” card that Christian had given me just before I left to go become a college quarterback. I found that card while we were packing up whatever we could fit into the our minivan after losing our home. Rereading his kind words may helped me through some of our darkest hours which had followed the NASCAR Nightmare, the PAC-12 Debacle, and the dark night of our soul when we lost our Daughter.

For those fleeting spring and summers of my Youth, piloting the Steamboat “Suwanee” was about as cool as it gets. (That is, admittedly, with “cool” being a little bit interchangeable with “nerdy.”)

We spent timeless summer days ferrying our fellow frogs to and fro in a “Wind In the Willows” world where scorpions need not apply.

So I certainly wasn’t looking to make a job change.

But one day, back in the day when there were these things called “newspapers,” we found a copy of the Detroit News one morning which had been left on one of the bench row seats on the upper deck of the “Suwanee.” It had been folded open so that the ‘help wanted’ section was staring into the early morning sun.

I remember there’d been one ad in particular that caught my eye:

DO YOU LIKE ROCK & ROLL, PIZZA, AND GOOD TIMES?

THEN THIS IS THE JOB FOR YOU!

This needed a closer look.

So I called the number and what’d ya know: they were able, “lucky for me,” to fit me into the schedule for an interview the very next day!

The day after, safely back aboard the “Suwanee,” I recalled my adventure. The job, it turns out, had involved selling knockoffs of name-brand perfumes and colognes.

Nothing surprising or particularly interesting about that or the fact that there was neither pizza nor rock & roll.

Instead, what was interesting was the way in which the company earned its revenue.

For it appeared that the company was profiting not from the sales themselves, but rather from the almost exclusively youthfully ignorant sales force of cash cow kids.

Each kid was bonded for the cost of $400 USD for every case they were issued which, if I remember correctly contained 100/1 oz. bottles of funky-smelling fragrances each. It appeared that the kids were then reportedly shuttled out via company vans to areas of the city too far away for them to walk back to their cars where they were then put to work — primarily descending upon gas stations and supermarket parking lots.

I remember that the kids were being instructed to charge $6.95 for every tiny bottle or eau de toilette they somehow managed to sell, and for for which the kids were allowed to keep $2 dollars from every sale.

The math told the story: the company was guaranteed at least $400 bucks from every kid for every case which I’d guess probably cost the company no more than $40 bucks wholesale. Then, the company raked in a little over one-third of the profits (68-percent to be precise) from every sale as well. (SPOILER ALERT: there weren’t too many sales.)

And so, the net result seemed to indicate that no matter what, the company was guaranteed a profit of at least $360 per case, while the kids appeared to be earning at most $200 bucks to offset the $400 bucks which they’d already unwittingly agreed to pay the company $400 bucks per case. And kids were walking out of there with two, three, and even four cases, of which they might sell at best perhaps one dozen bottles total.

I just remember thinking that the PAC-12 Network could very well have been running this same type of hustle on the Conference's one dozen member schools.

There were a few early indicators that perhaps should’ve caused concern.

There was discrepancy in reporting revenue which was concerning.

Also, the PAC-12’s 68-percent revenue share was at least 23-percent less than any other conference. (The next lowest revenue return was the ACC at 91-percent.)

But perhaps the more concerning number should’ve been the actual amount schools were receiving as a return on investment.

Both the SEC Network and ACC Network are believed to be 100-percent owned by ESPN.

Ownership of the Big-Ten Network is shared between Fox Sports and the Big-Ten Conference.

But the PAC-12’s idea of 100-percent ownership appears to have been queueing up a catastrophe.

After the 2013 PAC-12 Debacle, it would still be another four years before the #MeToo Movement ignited amid the firestorm of sexual abuse allegations leveled against onetime film producer and person of significance Harvey Weinstein.

And while the #MeToo movement marked a historic change in the way we understand the predatory risks women have often had to face as they’ve fought for parity of personage throughout the Western World, the movement was far from the start of the fight.

We like to tell ourselves that we’re a progressive society which now recognizes acts of intolerance which might’ve been treated with tacit agreement a decade ago.

So the suggestion  is ridiculous that 2013 “was a different time,” or that “back then” the same emphasis hadn’t been placed on preventing the sexualized objectification of underage girls.

Although the phrase “Believe All Women” has appeared to be a point of contention since it first entered our lexicon in 2017, the edict of “Believe All Children” regarding allegations of sexual assault is a fundamental tenet in the rule of law.

We’ve always protected our children above all else.

So the suggestion that any arm of any conference whose member universities, to reiterate, constitute of a dozen of the nation’s more prestigious and forward-thinking institutions of learning on earth schools would quietly shuffle aside any such allegations appears to be an idea that’s anathema.

The difference is that along with the birth of #MeToo is our inclination to mistakenly think that the level of our outrage was commensurate with the level of legal justice.

We would like to believe that acts such as aiming criminal threats of sexual assault at a 15-year-old girl who’s already struggling with anorexia and crippling anxiety would be treated more seriously today.

I’d like to believe that had what happened in 2013 instead happened today, then the PAC-12 might’ve acted differently.

Maybe.

But I doubt it.

The way I see it, if a vice president at the PAC-12 Network was aware of the alleged cornucopia of civil rights violations and outright criminal acts which had been committed over the weekend of September 13-15, 2013, by a freelance production company in the PAC-12’s employ, the PAC-12 Network as a whole should’ve been aware as well..

But I don’t know whether or not we’d still see today the same reasoning and reprehensible rationalization disguised as a policy decision dictated by mandatory freelance employment guidelines. But when the same profit/loss incentives to bury the problem still seem to look every bit as alluring today as they did a decade ago, that should be a serious cause for concern.

HR concerns or legal issues become irrelevant when business concerns are allowed to veto either, and executives are quietly encouraged to make “business decisions” designed to circumvent or outright ignore ethics violations and criminal acts.

I’d like to believe the rise of movements such as #MeToo has helped to shift the dynamics of the predator-prey conversation in a way not seen since the passage of Title IX in1972.

Suddenly any socially conscious campus carries the explosive potential to exact a cataclysmic cost upon any academic administration, athletic department, coaching staff or conference network.

But “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby!” still feels like it has a hella long way to go.

Our Daughter was around 19 years old when the #MeToo Movement gave rise.

Soon after, I remember she wrote a long post on Instagram.

Her hope was that it would help relieve some degree of the anxiety and fear which was, by then, stalking her every waking day.

It didn’t work.

When it comes to movements, you need clicks to move the needle. But you need fame to get the clicks. So unless you’re famous from the start, your movement ain’t gonna move; and your story ain’t gonna matter.

I don’t know if the people at the PAC-12 Network did what they did for the same reasons it seemed like they were doing it.

But I do wonder if the PAC-12 Network was a bit too concerned about the potential profit loss that might’ve resulted from reports of criminal threats involving the gang-rape of an underage girl which were allegedly being leveled against a freelance production company contracted by the Network.

After all, the show was still being produced on behalf of the PAC-12. And the PAC-12 and the PAC-12 Network were then, as they are now, both registered under the IRS as both 501(c) (3) non-profit entities as well as academic institutions.

If that were that to happen, the PAC-12 Network would’ve been left with nothing to show for investment.

For the fiscal year ending June 30, 2014, the PAC-12 Network reported earnings of just over $374 million in total revenue. And that figure appears to include just the PAC-12 Network — which is wholly owned by the Pac-12 Conference. What it doesn’t appear to include are the PAC-12 Conference’s other revenue streams that come from the rest of the PAC-12’s media arm, such as PAC-12 Enterprises and the PAC-12 Broadband Network. Nor does it appear to include the revenue that derived from the marketing arm of the PAC-12.

Pac-12 member universities reportedly received only between $1-million to $1.5-million per year from the Pac-12 Network for the 2013-2014 school year. That’s reportedly the lowest amount earned by the member schools of any athletic conference across college sports.

Under IRS rules, a non-profit must report its revenue and expense data based on its fiscal year; but it must report compensation data based on the calendar year completed during its fiscal year.

In other words, not only does “loss of profit” seem to be a nominal concern in retrospect; it appears to have an inappropriate concern even at the time, considering that the entire of notion of “profit” lies wholly outside the purview of any non-profit. But when that “non-profit” is raking in $347-million dollars in PROFIT that year? Well, that almost seems to begging legal questions for which the IRS might take an interest in demanding answers.

I believe that the act of demanding appears to raise questions. One of the most important may be why this didn’t appear to raise concerns.

I’m of the opinion that there’s a direct connection between Jim Jorden’s alleged actions and Jim Jorden Productions’ contract with the PAC-12 Network. That’s an important nexus, because I believe this could’ve opened the door to determining whether or not the the conduct of the PAC-12 may have risen to the level of Tort Liability and Vicarious Liability.

Moreover, I wonder if concerns should’ve been raised regarding whether or not the conduct of Jim Jorden and/or Jim Jorden Productions constituted criminal and/or civil liability, or if that conduct of Jim Jorden and/or Jim Jorden Productions may have met the legal threshold of “Theft by Deception.”

(On a personal note, I find it patently ridiculous to suggest that any Human Resources Department at any non-profit educational institution representing twelve of the more prestigious academic institutions on earth would possibly fail to recognize the potential violation of both Title VIII law as well as the federal civil rights violation of three federally protected classes: disability, gender, and age.)

Finally, I believe that the result of Jim Jorden’s conduct resulted in making it all reasonably impossible for our Daughter to seek help from the Eating Disorders Program at University of California San Francisco.

That wasn’t the end.

I was determined to seek justice on behalf of our Daughter.

And that’s where we hit a dead end.

Personal experience has taught me that trying to navigate the legal in search of justice can prove to be a soul-crushing exercise in futility.

On the same Monday when I spoke to Kirk Reynolds and the PAC-12 Network for the last time, I’d phoned the El Cerrito Police Department to follow up on the events of Saturday Night and swear out a criminal complaint in relation to narcotics theft and filing a false police report against me.

I remember listening in disbelief as the El Cerrito PD explained that the only way I could file a criminal complaint is if I came down to the station in person.

Remember: this was one day after I’d already landed back in North Carolina.

Myriad calls made to the El Cerrito Police criminal division went unanswered.

Follow-up messages went unreturned.

I remember that the FBI never really stepped up as an option. Instead, they seemed set on suggesting to us that no federal crime had been committed during the same period of time when the Department of Justice seemed to be shielding prolific pedophiles, including Jeffery Epstein and Larry Nasser.

And then there was our hometown Police Department in Matthews, North Carolina…

We’d lived for nearly a decade in Matthews, North Carolina. Our children went to school in Matthews.

Jim Jorden Productions was believed to have been based in Matthews at the time.

(NOTE: I believe Jim Jorden has since moved his operation out to Los Angeles, where he claims that his production company does between $1-million to $5-million dollars in annual revenue.)

What happened once I walked into the Matthews PD was, I believe, the most enraging/humiliating/frustrating moment of ideological disillusionment.

I remember the way in which the reporting officer hadn’t exactly said that it was not a crime. And I remember that he didn’t exactly say there was nothing the Matthews PD could do.

I remember it was more like he were suggesting that there was nothing the Matthews PD wanted to do about it.

I believe the cop’s exact words were: “What I suggest is that you go home and just try and be a real good dad.”

Bottom Line: the justice system failed our Daughter.

And in the aftermath, nobody has been held accountable for anything.

If Jim Jorden’s intent had been to see to it that our Daughter lived a life of fear and terror, he succeeded.

Imagine how life must’ve been for her.

Nightlights powerless to hold back the nightmares…

Awaking into a waking terror…

Day after day…

Tomorrow’s another day…

Same day as yesterday.

Our Daughter was athletic, lithe, and beautiful.

She’d received numerous offers from photographers and modeling agencies.

In the spring of her senior year of high school, just a few weeks before graduation, she finally accepted an offer from a young woman who, as I recall, had been herself a survivor of sexual trauma.

When I look at those photos, she appears as a woman of haunting beauty, with a look of unmistakable infinite sadness.

I often think of what it must’ve felt like; but it’s hard even to imagine; how it must’ve felt to wake up every day wondering if today’s the day.

It’s tough enough to balance school, sports, and family life. It’s even harder to focus when throughout that entire time, she was looking over her shoulder.

Then off to bed.

Nightlights and Night terrors.

Night after night.

How could she imagine a future when nightmares turn dreams into luxuries she couldn’t afford?

Our Daughter’s anorexia seem accelerated and her anxiety appeared to dominate her waking state.

Antidepressants offered little relief.

Cutting herself offered a little more.

This is the legacy by which I believe  Jim Jorden deserves to be defined. No other legacy than this.

For the longest time I believed that Jim Jorden had his fun, then that was that.

But then came one autumn afternoon.

The boys and I just happened to be looking out our picture window when a minivan came driving by very slowly. It slowed down even more when it was directly in front of our house. We couldn’t see the driver.

Then, the minivan turned around in the cul-de-sac and trawled back toward us. This time, as it passed our house in a speed only slightly faster than full stop, we all remembered how we could plainly see the driver’s face.

I don’t remember which of us said it first…

If it wasn’t  Jim Jorden behind the wheel, then it was either his doppelgänger or it was someone who’d spent a lot of money on a Jim Jorden mask for Halloween.

I realized the time.

I remember it happened during the fall because the girls’ high school soccer is in spring, and our Daughter was bringing the bus home.

I sprinted with panicked urgency down the stairs and out the door.

Halfway up the hill I intercepted our Daughter. Her face was a ghostly pallor.

Her voice was hollow. “I think I just saw Jim Jorden.”

Over the following weeks, I continued to reassure the kids (and the Wife) that there’s no way we could’ve seen what we’d all thought we’d saw. It wasn’t Jim Jorden. There was no way. It couldn’t have been Jim Jorden. No way. No way…

But even though I’m still not willing to say we’re all positive that it was him. But it turns out that it was definitely more than just “possible.”

Not long after that I ran into somebody who used to work with both of us.  I remember that he told me that was, in fact, back in town. He’d reportedly been hired by the SEC Network, which was owned by ESPN and was run out of its Charlotte facilities. And he was also doing work for the ACC Network, which was also said to be located in Charlotte.

Jim Jorden was said to be staying at a nearby Residence Inn. And in order to haul around his never-stolen cameras, equipment, and gear he was reportedly driving around in a rented cargo minivan.

In the September 12, 2023 edition of the Wall Street Journal, it was reported that British Petroleum CEO Bernard Looney abruptly resigned after it was discovered that Mr. Looney had not been “not fully transparent” regarding his failure to disclose having allegedly violated what’s generally considered the most baseline ethical standards by allegedly engaging in numerous inappropriate personal relationships with BP colleagues.

Once again, it didn’t require the #MeToo Movement for people to understand that this type of behavior is not only predatory and (predominantly) misogynistic; it’s also (predominantly) overlooked — particularly in professional fields where it appears to be, well, (predominantly) seen the most.

As such, it still leaves its brutalized it’s victims by shifting the ethical focus of the conversation onto them, framing the problem the problem as curable through therapy and compassion; while seeming to ignore the need to confront alleged predators who often remain in a position of power to be held accountable in terms of both social justice as well as justice under the Law.

The concept of the “Overton Window” may be perhaps the most popular memetic term among the Kool Kids nowadays to describe what’s always been the pneumatic forever war fought between popular culture and hegemony.

The ramifications of the hiring decisions made by conference networks probably won’t be seen until the Overton Window has open a little wider. It’s then that some of the greatest college athletes, none of whom had any say, nor approval, nor even awareness at the time, may be made aware of an uncomfortable reality perhaps when another decade has passed from now.

Just because there was a production company that called itself the “PAC-12 Network” doesn’t necessarily mean that it held itself to anywhere near the same standards as the PAC-12 Conference, or more importantly, its member schools.

Whether or not you think that the proliferation of college sports is a good thing or a great thing, we need to remember that it’s been pretty much an unregulated thing.

And while revenue sharing was the most notable exception, conference Networks can have the appearance of an unregulated financial vehicle.

The last known contact I had with Jim Jorden came in 2017. I remember because it was on the same day that our Daughter had been hospitalized the first time as a result of her attempting suicide.

For too long, I felt, I’d been consumed by hate.

I used to think that Jim Jorden could’ve changed our world for the better.

So I’d made the decision that I’d do whatever it took to help her exorcise whatever demons I could.

I wish I had a better memory of the email I’d drafted in order to say to Jim Jorden that I forgave him.

I couldn’t let what happened consume my life, and, by extension, the life of our Daughter and the life of our family any longer.

So I forgave him.

I forgave him for the sake of my daughter.

I forgave him the sake of his son as well.

I didn’t want his son to go through his life knowing that somewhere out there was someone who hated his father the way my daughter woke up every day knowing how much I had hated him.

I didn’t want his son to feel what my daughter had felt for the past four years.

Because hate shouldn’t stretch across generations.

And so I forgave him.

It took only a few minutes after I’d hit ‘send’ that my inbox lit up with his response.

I stared at my screen for long moments.

He answered so quickly, I’d reasoned, that the response couldn’t have been written any other way than sincere.

Maybe this was the end.

Maybe this was the start of a new beginning.

Maybe I’d just imagined all that gaslighting.

Maybe I’d misread him all these years the way his acolytes had always insisted I had.

I navigated my mouse to his re: name and clicked to open it.

It was an advertisement for Viagra.

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When I left the PAC-12 Network, I unwittingly walked past the closest BART station.

I’d then wasted nearly a half hour wandering The Streets of San Francisco before somehow ending up under Market Street and boarding the BART at the Westfield Mall stop. I then rode the transit through the Transbay Tube; through Oakland; through Berkeley (where disappointed Cal fans were already flooding out from the game and onto the BART); and eventually to the El Cerrito stop.

This was the first stroke of serendipity.

Before walking the mile or so the El Cerrito House, I diverted in the opposite direction where ust across the road from the El Cerrito station was a Target store.

I dashed inside and purchased a new duffle bag. That way, I hopefully wouldn’t have to haul all my belongs in cardboard boxes all the way back to the BART station.

This was the second stroke of serendipity.

It was nearly night when I got to the El Cerrito House.

I hadn’t ate or drank since before leaving Charlotte, and it was starting to take a toll because I remember being confused as to why my key wouldn’t unlock either door.

This was the third stroke of serendipity.

When I looked at my phone, its battery was 2%.

Two …frickin’ …percent.

I decided that my last call would be to Home.

I called my wife and asked her to please call the El Cerrito Police. I’d asked her to tell them who I was, what I looked like, why I was there, and to make absolutely sure that they knew that I wasn’t robbing the house. I remember telling her that I thought the locks had been changed, something wasn’t right, and I’d be grateful if the police were already there when Jim Jorden and his crew arrived back at the house so that there wouldn’t be any trouble.

This was the fourth and final stroke of serendipity.

When the police arrived, I learned that Jim Jorden had allegedly filed a false report earlier that evening claiming that I was breaking into the El Cerrito House.

My BART pass showed the time, down to the minute, from the moment I'd boarded at Market Street to the time I'd exited at El Cerrito. We were able to line that up against the time when Jim Jorden had allegedly called the El Cerrito Police 911 and filed a false police report claiming that I’d used my key to break into the house. By doing that, we were able to determine that I'd still been aboard the BART right around Berkeley at the same time Jim had allegedly called and claimed that at that very moment, I was robbing the house of everyone’s personal belongings and stealing HD cameras, audio, and production equipment valued in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The time stamp on the Target receipt then showed conclusively that at the same time these same two El Cerrito police officers radioed in that they’d arrived at the house, I’d been over a mile away, using my debit card to purchase a duffle bag.

Although they’d already determined during the first time they’d arrived at the house that there were no signs of a break-in or an attempted break-in, I nevertheless demonstrated that my key didn’t work in any of the door locks..

They quickly conceded that it was more than a little farfetched to suggest that someone who was purportedly breaking into a home would also ask their wife to call the police and give an accurate description of her husband right down to the clothes he was wearing, and then ask the police to go to that location in order to avoid any trouble considering that her husband couldn’t retrieve any of his belongs because all of the locks had apparently been changed.

One of the officers asked rhetorically what kind of an asshole would accuse someone of using their key to break into a home after they’d changed all the locks.

“Oh, you are in for a treat,” I remember answering anyway.

I remember that it was at least another hour before any of Jim Jorden’s guys began arriving back at the house.

I watched as “Brad” slid his new house key into the newly changed lock.

Where once I might’ve been the only person for days at a time, now there were about a dozen guys waiting to inside.

While one cop stayed outside and took “Brad” aside, the other cop walked with me inside the house.

It was readily apparent to me that my belongings had been gone through. The Middle Earth globe I’d been working on was nowhere to be found. Nor were either of my footballs. And anything related to the PAC-12 was missing — including anything with the PAC-12 logo on it and anything which had been given to me personally by Cal.

“A bunch of my stuff is missing,” I remember telling the officer who stepped inside the El Cerrito House with me.

He told me just to pack up. We could worry about that later.

I packed my airsoft pistol and ammo into my new duffle bag so I wouldn’t forget to check it in when I reached the airport. I wouldn’t want —

Suddenly I heard someone accusing me of having an illegal firearm.

I handed it the cop. The cop looked at it and handed it back.

“It’s an airsoft gun,” I remember he'd said. “C’mon.”

Lastly, I began packing all of my medication into my book bag in order to make sure that did stay with me for the duration of my return trip home.

That’s when I discovered that my entire month’s supply of Adderall had been stolen.

Under the law this constitutes three felonies — theft of a controlled substance, felony possession of a controlled, and, due to the amount (about 180 grams), intent to distribute. In California, this might’ve triggered the “Three Strikes Rule” — meaning an automatic sentence of life in prison. And in California, since it’s unknown which specific occupant of the house stole it, the entire house could’ve been charged and could’ve been staring at a life sentence.

“Who took it?” I remember loudly demanding.

Other than a few sly smiles which I’ve never been entirely sure wasn’t just my imagination, I remember the feeling of standing all alone like a department store orphan who couldn’t find their parent during a shopping trip as I watched the way in which the Jim Jorden Production crew members barely even broke stride as they filed back outside with drone-like precision through the sliding glass door which, obviously, someone had unlocked and slid open.

“Who fucking took it?” I remember repeating.

I believed with virtual certainty that these were the “guys living in that house” who Jim Jorden was referring to when he’d allegedly given his “guarantee” that “something will happen to [our Daughter].”

So it matters very much that these very guys may have also been the very same guys who’d also steal what was believed to be 180 grams of Adderall. Under California law, that’s considered intent to distribute. And if convicted, they may be the same kind of men who might be ready and willing to risk a mandatory sentence of life in prison if convicted.

When I turned toward him as if I could appeal reality, I remember that first thing I noticed was way in which the police officer seemed to be surveying the situation. While he might’ve been thinking just how much more of them there were than us, I remember thinking just how much I didn’t care.

“There’s an entire month’s supply of Adderall missing,” I told the cop in a flat tone.

“Just forget about that for right now,” I remember the police officer saying.

But I wasn’t willing to let it go.

“They stole an entire month’s worth of a controlled substance!” I said with growing rage. “I don’t have insurance! We had to pay for that out of our own pocket! They went through the stuff! There’s some expensive stuff missing!”

I remember that his voice was in a low growl when the officer repeated himself for a third time.

I can’t really say for sure when members of the Jim Jorden Productions crew had started filing through the sliding glass doors, into the room, and parading past us. I think that at first it was as if I could see them, but it wasn’t registering to my brain what all it was that I was seeing.

“I’m not just gonna let them steal my stuff!” I remember contradicting the officer yet again. “What, I haven’t been humiliated enough? There’s no way I’m gonna —“

I think it when I noticed the way that the police had suddenly started to look utterly gobsmacked that I finally realized what I’d been watching without realizing what I’d been seeing.

The Jim Jorden Productions crew had been unloading hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of HD cameras, audio, and production equipment from their various vehicles. They were then stacking onto collapsible carts, wheeling it past us, and disappearing into a storage room before reemerging with their carts now unloaded.

“Say what you will,” I remember ruminating, “but for this guy to file a false police report claiming that someone else stole the same camera equipment which may already have been stolen — by them, and then wheel that same equipment past the same cops who are investigating the false report and the guy who got reported falsely? That’s a flex.”

On Monday, the after I arrived back home in Charlotte, I spoke with the PAC-12 by way of Kirk Reynolds for what I believe was the final time.

I remember Reynolds didn’t waste any time with idle chit-chat. Instead, he started out by informing me that he’d just come of a meeting between Network executives and quote-unquote “everyone” from Jim Jorden Productions.

(I’m not sure whether or not it really matters if by “everyone” Kirk Reynolds meant that the entire staff from Jim Jorden Productions had carpooled into San Francisco and piled into the 3^rd Floor conference room at 360 3^rd Street; or if “everyone” meant that the only member of  Jim Jorden Productions who was present for the meeting was Jim Jorden himself; and Jim Jorden had taken it upon himself to be the authoritative voice who’d elected himself to speak on behalf of “everyone.”)

It didn’t really matter because either way, the result of the meeting appeared to be that the PAC-12 had decided to adopt the position that the events which had occurred over the weekend had nothing to do with either the PAC-12 Conference as a whole or the PAC-12 Network in particular. Rather, it would apparently be viewed as nothing more than an internal employment dispute between the head of an outside production company which had been contracted by the PAC-12 Network, and a freelance writer/producer whose employment contract with that production company had recently been terminated for cause.

The net result, therefore, appeared to be that regardless of whatever may or may not have allegedly happened at the El Cerrito House on Saturday Night, the PAC-12 Network would continue to take essentially the same position which had already been articulated by Michael Tolajian when he and I spoke on Saturday Afternoon.

Furthermore, the PAC-12 Conference was apparently in agreement with the PAC-12 Network in determining that discussing the matter any further would be inadvisable because of the risk associated with attracting potentially unfavorable media attention which might damage the PAC-12 Network and/or Jim Jorden Productions.

So while the PAC-12 may have extended their best wishes to my daughter and I, we also needed to understand that the Network was first and foremost a business.

Regarding that… I recently did a little digging. According to the IRS, both the PAC-12 Conference and the PAC-12 Network were registered as a 501(c)3 non-profit entity which meant that they may have enjoyed tax-exempt status. And that tax-exempt status sure makes it seem like that PAC-12 Network was not first and foremost a business. Rather, it actually seems like the PAC-12 was instead supposed to have been first-and-foremost a non-profit educational entity. And that might’ve meant that ‘profit’ may not have been relevant to the PAC-12’s reported non-profit educational mandate.

Regardless, I remember thinking at the time I didn’t appreciate what happened next, or the way Reynolds seemed to sound like what happened next was all just part of one big “gotcha.”

Apparently, Jim Jorden had claimed that the actual reason I’d been fired was because I’d suffered “some sort of mental breakdown" and abruptly left California without notice and flown back to Charlotte to seek psychiatric help.

I then remember Reynolds adding that Jim had also claimed to him that, quote, “he said he even paid for your plane ticket home to Charlotte out of his own pocket.”

I think that’s when I realized I’d reached the point where I just wasn’t interested in playing along anymore. I don’t think I was still even capable of feeling “absolutely gobsmacked” about whatever this was. I remember just feeling fatigued and numb.

So I remember being almost monotone as I pointing out to Reynolds that it certainly seemed like Jim Jorden was now telling a lot different story than the one I remember Reynolds had claimed Jim had told him the night before we’d sat down together in the 3^rd Floor lobby of the PAC-12 Network two days earlier back in San Francisco.

But by then, I don’t think I cared anymore about what Jim Jorden had to say about much of anything; and I remember telling Reynolds as much. I’d been dealing with Jim’s bullshit for much of the past decade of my life and I was done. It may have made the decision ten years too late, but I’d made the decision. What mattered to me now more than anything else at that moment was what the PAC-12 planned to do about having an accused pedophile on their payroll who was the executive producer of what was possibly their Network’s highest profile show.

Reynolds’ response feels repugnant to remember…

…And I remember it was the moment when I realized that the real Kirk Reynolds seemed a lot less like the guy who apologized for making that racist, misogynistic, homophobic film that cost him his dream job with the Forty-Niners, and a lot more like the guy who wanted to make the film in the first place.

I remember Reynolds’ response was to suggest that instead of blaming Jim Jorden for what was said on Friday, maybe I should to take a look at myself instead and ask what it is was that I might’ve done that would’ve caused Jim to react the way he did.

Then I remember a suddenly emboldened and enraged Reynolds following up by demanding, “What would you say if I told you that we had a meeting about you today and everyone there all said that they’re much happier now that you’re gone?!?”

“Well, I guess I’d say, ‘Which of you motherfuckers stole my Adderall and thought about raping my Daughter?’”

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Someone the PAC-12 Network had hired had allegedly made criminal threats involving the sexual assault of a child. Now I’d returned to California to find out what the PAC-12 planned on doing about it.

I believe my flight landed at SFO Airport sometime around 3:00pm PDT.

And I believe my return flight had been due to depart SFO around 12:30am PDT.

In the interim, I’d decided that I needed to do what I came back to do while doing my best to avoid too much trouble or unwanted attention. (Key word: “unwanted.”)

So in line with that, I’d intended to make my first stop the PAC-12 Network. I’d intended to ask that an intern, production assistant, or some other representative from the PAC-12 Network might accompany me to the El Cerrito House so I could quietly collect my belongings. My hope was that having someone present with me who represented the PAC-12 would help to ensure that there wouldn’t be any.

After that, my plan was to take the BART back to San Francisco International Airport where my Witching Hour flight would deliver me first to my hometown of Detroit in order to catch a connecting flight which would bring me back home to Charlotte-Douglas International Airport just over 24 hours from when I’d landed at SFO.

I figured that after taking check-in into consideration, this gave me just over six hours to take the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) into San Francisco and then points beyond in order to get done what I’d flown out there to do.

That was my plan.

But as they’re fond of saying in the military, “No plan ever survives first contact.”

After calling home and touching base with my wife to let the family know I’d landed safely, I took the BART (“Bay Area Rapid Transit”) into downtown San Francisco and the PAC-12 Network facilities.

It was a little after 4:00pm PDT (7:00pm EDT) by the time I arrived at 360 Third Street. I remember this because across the Bay in Berkeley, the Cal vs. Ohio State game had just kicked off.

That meant that Jim Jorden Productions should be at the game for the next several hours and not at the El Cerrito House.

Make no mistake: I’d considered heading over to Memorial Stadium to find Jim Jorden and double-dog-dare him to say again what he’d said about our Daughter. And I still believe that there’s no time like the present to deal with such matters.

But whether or not it would’ve been the right time, it definitely wouldn’t have been the right place. I had no intention of doing anything on gameday that would’ve distracted or disrespected Coach Sonny Dykes or Coach Tony Dennis Franklin or Jared Goff or anyone else in Golden Bears family.

Instead, I’d have to wait until Monday in order to apologize; and it would probably have to be done over the phone. (Zoom had launched on January 1, 2013. But nine months later, it was still virtually unknown to the public.)

“Nondescript” might’ve best fit the bill for the building at 360 Third Street where the PAC-12 Network was headquartered. I looked at it as the architectural equivalent of a plain white teeshirt. It looked like the sort of building in which you might picture the next-to-top floor being occupied by a wholesale distributor for Chiquita Bananas, while on the ground floor there was a small eatery featuring Thai/Guatemalan fusion cooking that had a word-of-mouth reputation for its amazing spring roll burritos.

Well, I wasn’t hungry and I was in no mood to brook any monkey business.

My plan was to intercept Michael Tolajian and confront him with what had allegedly happened the night before.

But despite the fact that Saturday is gameday and gameday is the most crucial day in football, Tolajian appeared to be nowhere to be found.

Instead, it was Kirk Reynolds who found me.

I remember reminding myself to be careful when speaking with Reynolds.

But I soon forgot to remember.

I thought it stood to reason that if the PAC-12 Network actually had given Jorden an ultimatum to fire me “or else,” then one of the Network’s vice-presidents would’ve known all about it.

But Reynolds had seemed genuinely flummoxed. I also remember how effusively he’d spoken about the work I’d been doing.

Then, I remember Reynolds saying how surprised he was to see that I was still out on the West Coast. Apparently, Jim Jorden had allegedly called him the night before to let him know that our Daughter had suffered some sort of mental breakdown and/or psychotic break. And so I’d apparently quit the show without telling anyone and returned to Charlotte in order to seek help for my deranged Daughter.

I think Reynolds then said something about how lucky I was to have someone like Jim Jorden looking out for me because apparently this wasn’t the first time I’d done something like this.

What a stupid story, I remember thinking.

And yet, that’s when I did something even stupider.

As if compelled by some mystical force of almost unimaginable metaphysical idealistic idiocy, my common sense watched helplessly as I TMI’d detail after detail about our alleged experience with Jim Jorden the night before.

And as I told him about the alleged criminal threats leveled by Jorden against our Daughter, I distinctly remember that it seemed as though Reynolds’ demeanor was redshifting into a more dangerous wavelength.

Whether or not the personal relationship between Jim Jorden and Kirk Reynolds had anything to with what happened is something I can’t speak to either way.

But it seemed unspeakable to suggest that the Vice-President of Communications for the PAC-12 Network would participate in the cover-up of allegations leveled against the executive producer of one of the Network’s highest profile shows — allegations which involved criminal threats and the sexual assault of a fifteen-year-old girl suffering from anorexia.

To his credit, I remember that Reynolds’ initial reaction had been to second the sentiment that there was no excuse for anyone to direct criminal threats toward someone’s daughter. I’m pretty sure he'd then agreed that this was something that needed to be shared with Michael Tolajian.

Next thing I knew, Reynolds and I were stepping into what was either audio suite or an editing suite — I forget which. Either way, I remember that there was a mixing board in there. Also, I remember using the ISDN line to dial up Michael Tolajian at home. That’s important because ISDN uses two line to call, so that you can record the narrator on one track while recording the producer on the other.  Either way, I remember thinking that although we used the room because it was sound proof and Reynolds probably did this for the sake of privacy, I was also cognizant of the fact that there was also a chance that the call was being recorded.

I recall a soothing wave of relief when Tolajian said that to his knowledge, there was no truth to Jim Jorden’s claim that the PAC-12 Network demanded my firing. To his credit, I believe that Tolajian had also reassured me that both the PAC-12 Network and Cal had only good things to say about me.

But then, I remember Tolajian recounted the same thing as Reynolds; that Jorden had called him as well and apparently told a similar story of how I’d suddenly left San Francisco and returned to Charlotte to deal with of some sort of a family emergency involving our Daughter.

Next thing I remember, I’d recounted with bullet point precision the events that I’d already told Reynolds regarding what had transpired the previous evening. I remember making a point of emphasizing that because Jorden was screaming so loudly (as he often seemed so want to do), that he could clearly be heard by everyone in the room.

I remember emphasizing that the alleged threats Jorden had appeared to be unambiguously aimed at our daughter could constitute criminal threats involving the sexual assault of a minor. I believe I’d also stressed the fact that our daughter had been in the room and heard everything.

I also remember stating categorically that she'd believed Jorden’s alleged threats.

I remember saying that no little girl should ever have to hear things like that.

I remember recounting how afterwords it felt as though our Daughter simply shattered. And I remember telling Tolajian that I’d saved all of the texts for when the criminal complaint alleging criminal threats and menacing was sworn out.

I believe I’d then reminded him that our little girl was already battling anorexia and severe anxiety, and was already struggling to keep her head above water. And that was before Jim Jorden threatened her with gang-raped — all because of a show that was being produced for the PAC-12 Network.

I think I’d then concluded by saying something along the lines of Jim Jorden’s actions having been completely unacceptable and potentially criminal and I’d certainly hope that this was something which the PAC-12 Network would agree.

I remember noticing that while my focus had been on talking to Tolajian, Kirk Reynolds appeared to have slipped out of the room.

When I looked out the door, I remember seeing that Reynolds appeared to be taking on his cell phone while simultaneously glancing quickly in my direction.

I remember that Tolajian began his response by mentioning that he, too, had children, and if it were him who was in this situation, he’d feel the same way.

Then I remember the feeling like the world took a nosedive as any hope for a just and decisive resolution came crashing to earth.

I remember Tolajian responded by explaining that because Jim Jorden was a freelancer, and not a direct employee of the PAC-12, the PAC-12 Network, or any other arm of the PAC-12, then there was nothing the PAC-12 Network could do.

With carefully measured emotion, I remember pointing out that that there were twelve member universities which made up the PAC-12. And each of those twelve universities operated according to a code of conduct — every one of which would’ve almost certainly considered what happened to our Daughter to be in violation of every one of those university’s codes of conduct. And if the PAC-12 Conference was okay working with individuals whose conduct could be considered cause for expulsion from any one of those member universities which make up the PAC-12, then something was very wrong.

I believe I’d also reminded Tolajian about the agreement that all freelancers were required to sign; and that if memory served, that agreement had been to abide by the same standards as outlined in the PAC-12 Conference's employee handbook.

But Tolajian’s position — and by extension the PAC-12’s position —appeared to set. Whatever issue I had with Jim Jorden’s conduct was something I’d have to take up with Jim Jorden Productions because the PAC-12 had no obligation to get involved.

And to that end, I remember Tolajian had then added that the PAC-12 not wanting to get involved included sending someone from the Network with me to collect my belongings from the El Cerrito House.

It felt like condescendingly cold comfort as I heard Tolajian apparently conclude the proceedings by reassuring me that he might be able to make sure that once this season was over, the PAC-12 wouldn’t have to rehire Jim Jorden or Jim Jorden Productions for any new projects after that. But beyond that, I remember he’d repeated, the PAC-12 wouldn’t be able to get involved.

Watching out the window at Kirk Reynolds wrapping up his call as well, I wondered what met the PAC-12’s threshold to be considered “getting involved.”

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Within hours, I found myself boarding the redeye at Charlotte Douglass International Airport (CLT). I was headed back out to SFO.

Because we had to choose the soonest flight with the cheapest ticket cost, I’d have to catch a connecting flight through Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (DFW).

The night before, I’d sought council from a handful of friends with whom I’d relied on over the years whenever I’d felt as though I was on the brink of possibly doing something impetuous and/or stupid.

One of the key go-to people I would call in search of advice was Scott Brick.

Scott was one of the legendary VoiceOver/narrator talents in the audiobook industry. He'd narrated books written by some of the great authors, including Isaac Asimov, , Tom Clancy, Michael Crichton, Philip K. Dick, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Grisham, Frank Herbert, , Erik Larson, Dennis Lehane, Robert Ludlum, Brad Meltzer, Nathaniel Philbrick, Ayn Rand, and Orson Scott Card.

In 2004, he’d been featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

In 2007, Scott began narrating several of my scripts while I was at NASCAR. It was Scott who narrated the essay I’d written, edited, and produced in 2011 for the 10^th anniversary of 9/11.

Scott, in turn, strongly suggested that I call the Melanie Thomas. Melanie was a mutual friend. But more importantly, she was Scott’s agent. Although she was with Adams Artists at that time, she’s since moved over to ACM Talent Agency by 2024.

If I remember correctly, it was Scott who’d called first so he could give her a head’s up that I was going be calling her in need of help and advice with a… situation… that could certainly be considered to be out-of-the-ordinary.

He’d soon called back to report that her cell had gone straight to voicemail. (I mean, it was Friday Night. And it was the night of Friday The 13^th at that. And I believe she was a recent newlywed. So frankly, it would’ve been a little weird if she actually had answered.) Scott left a message, then called me back and suggested I do the same.

After landing at DFW, I powered up my iPhone. I remember seeing that Melanie had returned my call sometime while I was somewhere over America.

After calling home and checking in, I remember I’d then tried Melanie’s phone. This time, Melanie had answered. And just like that, the threat of phone tag was averted.

I remember how compassionate and kind Melanie had been. She could’ve been like, “Not my area of expertise, not my client, not my problem. But that was farthest from what happened. But that wasn’t the outer limits of her kindness. She’d gone even further above and beyond by bringing into the conversation her newlywed husband who, I believe, had been just starting to gain some solid traction as a producer in Hollywood at that time.

It was while talking to Melanie and her husband over speakerphone that I remember I’d started to realize for the first time we had not, in fact, been overreacting the night before to what seemed like Jim Jorden’s narcissistic rage.

After hearing what had happened and what Jim Jorden had allegedly said, Melanie’s husband seemed adamant that this needed to taken seriously. Actually, he sounded borderline enraged.

I remember listening as he shared with me that something he was absolutely committed to exposing and ending his sort of behavior in the media industry.

But this, I remember him confiding, this was about as bad as it gets. Here was a man who, despite having just turned 50 years old a few days ago, had threatened a teenage girl with gang rape.

As soon as I interjected that I hadn’t specifically said that I wasn’t sure if  Jim had actually threatened to rape our Daughter personally. Rather, I'd believed that he’d threatened to have her gang raped by members of Jim Jorden Productions who were in his employ.

I remember Melanie’s husband had then said something that’s always stuck with me. It meant the world. I remember he’d demanded, “So he hires people who he thinks would have no problem committing rape? He hires people who he thinks would have no problem gang-raping a teenage girl if he told them too? And the PAC-12 has no problem hiring him? That’s sick. This guy belongs in prison.”

I remember he’d then laid out the situation by explaining to me that by allegedly threatening our Daughter, he seemed to believe that by allegedly threatening a minor with sexual assault, Jorden may have violated federal law. Accordingly, I remember he’d actually urged me to contact the FBI first thing Monday morning.

It had long been alleged that Jim Jorden seemed to have a reputation for having a temper that might best be described as “explosive.” He’d reportedly lived for years under allegations of serial adultery and sexual harassment allegations.

But now, Jorden’s behavior may have reached the level of criminal misconduct.

Transmitting “criminal threats” is often considered a crime in and of itself.

A “threat” can rise to the level of a “criminal threat” when it’s made with the intention of causing someone to fear injury or death to themselves or a loved one.

It’s believed that in almost every state, as well as under federal law, what matters is whether the target of a threat believes that the threat may be legitimate. If so, then the act of making that threat may be considered a “criminal threat.”

However, many states don’t require evidence that a victim actually experienced fear or terror. Rather, if a reasonable person might conclude that the threat had been made with the intended result of causing either intimidation and/or fear, then that threat meets the legal threshold of a “criminal threat.”

Next, it’s important to note that there are all kinds of ways in which threats can be communicated. It could be communicated in writing, verbally and non-verbal (ie body language, gestures, or actions), or through a third person. It just has to be enough to communicate a threat.

But when a threat is transmitted using an electronic device (aka computers or cell phones) that act can often be considered a criminal threat under not only state law but federal law as well.

And when the act involves allegedly threatening an underage girl with gang raped by individuals who were in his employ may have been felony crimes under state law in both California and North Carolina, as well as a violation of federal law.

Moreover, a threat can still considered a criminal threat even if the person making the threat never actually had any intention to carry it out.

Again, the prosecution only needs to show that: 1) the defendant communicated a threat of harm to another; 2) the defendant intended that the communication be taken as a threat; and 3) the threat was credible and specific so as to place a person in fear of harm.

Oh, and one more thing: someone can be charged with making a criminal threat regardless of whether or not they’d ever even had the ability to actually carry out that threat.

Criminal threats aren’t about the person who’s making the threat. It’s about the person(s) for whom the threat is directed.

Think “bomb threat.” It doesn’t matter if there’s an actual bomb. Nor does if matter if the person(s) calling in the threat has no bomb making skills. It doesn’t even matter if that person actually has access to anything “explosive.”

None of this is new and none of these are new and/or untested laws.

Laws against making criminal threats have been on the books since 1948. (The federal criminal codes were updated in 1986 and again in 1994.)

PLEASE: If you suspect a crime involving children, please CALL or TEXT: 1-800-4-A-CHILD (1-800-422-4453).

For more information, please log onto: https://www.usa.gov/report-crime.

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“Honest people don’t suspect dishonesty. And that’s why we get tricked.”

     — Matthias Corbascio, surgeon, Karolinska University (Stockholm, Sweden)

We did not return together to SFO (San Francisco International Airport) on Thursday, September the 12^th.

Nor did we return together the next day, Friday the 13^th.

On the evening of Friday the 13^th, I remember that our Daughter and I were hanging out in our “bedroom” which was really more our “dorm room.” There were beanbags chairs and PlayStation(s) and X-Box(s) and a giant floor-to-ceiling picture window and a king-sized plus bed which, at that particular moment, Anastasia and I were camped out on and catching up on episodes on the NBC series “Community” which she’d set to record on DVR.

We had the window blinds and the picture window open so we could watch as twilight had just begun to spill over the setting sun.

We could clearly hear her Mum/my wife pulling our consummately-dependable midnight green Chrysler mini-van into our driveway. As she cut the engine and began the arduous ritual of unbuckling the boys and unleashing them once more upon the world, I could hear through the open window what sounded like she was talking to someone on her iPhone 3. She sounded perturbed. I stood up from the coffee table which sat in front of the window and where you could find me sitting cross-legged on the carpet while editing and/or writing.

I paused the show and exited out our bedroom door just as she walked through the front door and into our 3-story tall foyer with the crystal chandelier that I never did figure out how to dust safely.

I cocked my head quizzically as she simultaneously looked up.

I could read her mouth the words: “Jim Jorden.”

Then: “He called me.”

I remember as she mounted the stairs and rounded into our bedroom that she was speaking in that no-can-defend quizzical-yet-commanding tone that’s a sure-fire social litmus test to capable of revealing if someone is a Mom.

“So you’re seriously trying to get me to believe right now that my husband is crazy because you just said so?” I remember she demanded. “Why? Because you’re such an extraordinarily trustworthy person and such a morally upright citizen?”

Moments later, she was standing across the room on the other side of the bed.

I remember being able to hear what sounded like Jim Jorden’s voice filtering through the phone. But I don’t recall being able to clearly sus out the other side of the conversation other than a part of a sentence here or a string of words there. Instead, I watched as my wife’s face continue to grow increasingly more flushed with every tete-a-tete.

Suddenly there was silence.

She stopped and looked down at her iPhone.

“Really?!?” she snarled, exasperated.

She'd started to recount what had just happened.

I remember it was at once both unbelievable yet all-too familiar.

Since the term “gaslighting” became popularized sometime around the run-up to the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, there’ve been voluminous psychological and sociological research papers published regarding this particularly insidious behavior.

…And I haven’t read a goddamned one because just thinking about this subject triggers trauma and spawns ideations of a medieval nature the likes of which I hope you will never have reason to relate.

So I grabbed this definition of “gaslighting” off of the website Psychology Today. It’s pretty good — or at least good enough to get us where we need to go and make sure we’re all talking about more or less the same thing. Either way, like it/don’t like it, it’s gonna have to do:

Gaslighting is an insidious form of manipulation and psychological control. Victims of gaslighting are deliberately and systematically fed false information that leads them to question what they know to be true, often about themselves. They may end up doubting their memory, their perception, and even their sanity. Over time, a gaslighter’s manipulations can grow more complex and potent, making it increasingly difficult for the victim to see the truth.

It seems to me that gaslighting is a multi-pronged attack and not enough attention is paid to the second front. Gaslighting involves not only a perpetrator trying to convince their targeting victim that they’re “crazy,” it also tends to involve the perpetrator manufacturing gossip in order to convince the victim’s family, friends, coworkers, contacts, etc. that the victim is “crazy” as well.

There’s one facet in particular which I believe to be particularly insidious. It’s way in which it seems like someone who’s trying to defend themselves against gaslighting may instead become their own worst enemy.

It seems to me that victims of gaslighting more often than not reach out to others for help. For whatever reason, we seem to be driven retell the lies in an attempt to refute them. This could lead to the victim feeling compelled to include the gaslighting as a key part of their self-defense.

But by telling others what they believe is happening, the victim, without realizing it, and without any prompting by the gaslighter, may have just introduced the toxin into the bloodstream. They’ve just done the gaslighter’s work for them. And, perhaps in the process, they may have also just absolved the gaslighter (in the mind of the gaslighter at least) of responsibility, because after all, it wasn’t the gaslighter who was spreading their lies.

What results could be considered to be the creation of a binary set of competing realities — one real and the other synthetic. And once this happens, it seems to me that the victim has just placed themselves in an untenable position. For as much as we’d love to believe otherwise, reality is often no match for a gaslighter who’s adept in reworking the false narrative in order to make it the more alluring option. Then, it seems like more often than not, inconsistencies and revisions are dismissed or discounted by way of good ol’ cognitive dissonance.

So when it was my iPhone that subsequently chirped awake, and the caller ID read:

Jim Jorden

I guess it was my turn to be convinced I was crazy.

I put it on speakerphone so my wife could hear.

Looking back, the only sense I can make for why his first phone call might’ve been made to my wife instead of me might’ve been because maybe he’d wanted her to watch me being forced to defend myself against his ‘manly aggression’.

But I imagine that for any misogynist, the idea that a marriage could be strengthened through every succeeding crucible may have been hopelessly alien.

It didn’t matter if what followed was an unprecedented amount of bullshit.

What mattered was that this wasn’t our first rodeo.

With that being said, I hope that now you’ll understand why I won’t be repeating any of the specifics from the gaslighting which followed.

Moreover, I don’t believe there ever was, nor do I believe there ever could’ve been, any evidence of any kind to substantiate any of his feckless attacks. Instead, it seemed like one pitiless “plea to authority” piled atop another. I remember first laughing to myself and then laughing at him as very accusation seemed to reference events which I don’t believe ever happened, acts which I don’t believe I’d ever committed, and statements which I don’t believe I’d ever said.

I remember that was claiming something about how Cal had called the PAC-12 Network because they were so outraged as what I’d done and Jim Jorden had just gotten off a conference call with both Kirk Reynolds and Mike Tolajian. They'd just informed him that both Cal and the PAC-12 Network were demanding that I be fired immediately… or else. I believe he was claiming that Tolajian was going to recommend to the PAC-12 Network that Jim Jorden Productions as a whole should be terminated if he didn’t fire me forthwith. I remember he’d also claimed that the PAC-12 was prepared to file a lawsuit against Jim Jorden personally in order to recoup any money the Network had already invested in our show.

I remember finally deciding to cut him off and say something along the lines of, you know that never happened, right? Not only that, I remember telling him what I believe he must’ve know all along: that he and I both knew that he couldn’t have witnessed what he was claiming because he hadn’t even been there when these things supposedly happened, but I couldn’t have been there either… since none of ever happened.

“And still you haven’t said ‘thank you’ for writing your dad’s eulogy,” I believe I’d added with snarky

And that’s when I remember that instead of answering, he pivoted.

“What kind of father are you to bring an attractive teenage girl out here to a house with a bunch of guys in it?” I remember Jim had suddenly demanded.

I remember that I’d fought the urge to defend my decision; to say that there was an inpatient program for eating disorders through UCSF and Stanford. Then for whatever reason, I inexplicably felt like I needed to plead my case to him by reminding him of what I’d explained to him countless times before: that I was bringing Her out there for medical treatment and therapy and recovery and —

“Lemme tell you something!” he erupted, screaming so loudly that our Daughter, who was sitting on the bed, could hear him as if he were standing in the room and and shouting into her ear, “You want to bring a very pretty teenage girl out here? I got five horny guys living in this house! You come back out here and I’m telling you right now: something WILL happen to her! I can guarantee you that!”

I watched the screen on my iPhone as it showed that the call had ended.

I remember staring at my phone for several seconds.

I was so entranced by the digital brick I was now holding, unsure whether whether to feel triumphant or angry or mollified or whatever else that I’d completely forgotten that our Daughter had been in the room the entire time as well. And so, it registered as though coming from some far off place when our Daughter’s voice say in that particularly familiar way she always answered her phone:

“Huh-Lowww?”

When I ripped my gaze away from my inert screen, I was staring into the face of our Daughter. She wore a perplexed look as she appeared to be listening.

Her face, which had appeared always pale as of late because of her anorexia, was now ghostly. But then I saw that familiar fire blaze to the surface. I rarely articulated it, but I loved to see this fire. This was how she fought the odds after she was born seven weeks early and her heart stopped twice during delivery. This was the fire that bore her from the neonatal ICU to the soccer pitch as the youngest player on the varsity squad. This was the fire that you did not want to f*ck with.

“Why are trying to convince me my dad’s gone crazy?” She demanded.

I only heard the voice on the other end sounding as though it were one of adult characters in a Peanuts cartoon.

“Stop It!” I remember she'd snapped. “You lie. You were on speakerphone! The whole time! Roasted! I heard every word you said. I heard what you said about me!”

I remember how quiet for a moment she suddenly became.

Then, I remember watching as she looked at her phone, then set it on the bed.

Her eyes, which had always been wide with beauty and life, were now dilated saucers brimming with tears that shimmered in time with her trembling little body.

“_{i didn’t do anything},” she said in barely above a whisper.

I tried to say something but no words would form in my mind or from my mouth. Instead I just stood there with my shoulders in a half-hunch shrug, shaking my head as if trying to coax the right words loose.

She’d drawn her knees up to her chest in a pose that looked something like a sitting fetal position. She then wrapped her arms around her legs and buried her face so that her beautiful red hair cascaded over her knees.

For some reason, I thought about how people who are dying as a result of a traumatic event supposedly tend to pull themselves into the fetal position as a way of protecting themself. I couldn’t really say either way if it just a wive’s tale.

My wife sat down on the bed next to our Daughter and folder her into an embrace.

“I didn’t do anything,” our Daughter repeated. Her voice was muffled but it nevertheless came though — this time with a note of exasperation.

I thought about how the same thing is often said as well about how people dying from starvation and/or dehydration also tend to curl into the fetal position.

“I didn’t do anything!” Our daughter’s head popped up. Tears rolled down.

My phone chirped, alerting me to a text.

You are no longer welcome in california

Our Daughter unfolded and threw her arms around her Mom’s neck.

“Mommy, I didn’t do anything!”

“No you didn’t,” her Mom said soothingly.

Deep inconsolable sobs seemed pried loose from someplace even deeper.

“Mom I didn’t do anything!” Our Daughter repeated again and then once more.

“Mommy!”

I could now see that tears were rolling down my wife’s face as well.

“MOMMY!”

The tears roiled and rolled down.

I remember that moments after I took both of them into my embrace and held them, our Sons sailed into our bedroom — most likely drawn by the out-of-the-ordinary tone and tenor of the voices therein. Without asking what was wrong or waiting for any sort of prompt, they scaled up onto the bed and joined Our hug.

My text notification chirped:

so sad

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