STAY ANGRY, MY FRIENDS

When we were both twenty, a friend since my early teens, whom I’ll call Jake, and I decided to save our wages and go to Europe for three months. We got a $135 one-way airfare, hitch-hiked, often slept in the homes of friendly Europeans we met, or in parks, and ate mostly grocery and bakery food.

—

One Saturday afternoon, Jake and I were on a short road trip to Pennsylvania. We passed through a depressed, small coal town and needed to use a pay phone. We entered a dark, bleak bar, with no music playing on the jukebox. I made the call and we left. When we did, usually upbeat Jake said, “I couldn’t wait to get out of there. That was like the places my father used to take me as a kid.”

I asked, “Your father took you to bars when you were a kid?” He said, “Yeah, we went to places like this on Saturday afternoons. He sat at the bar and drank for hours with a couple other guys, bought me a Coke and had me sit at a table, alone.”

I guess his father told his mother he was taking Jake out on father-son outings and didn’t want her to know he was really just getting drunk on his day off.

—

She wasn’t deceived. When her college-educated husband’s alcoholism cost him his job, Jake’s mom kicked him out of their modest house.

As the oldest of four kids, with a low-wage-earning mother, the family learned how to get by without much money. Jake told me, for example, that instead of paying for garbage pick-up, they threw their trash in dumpsters behind stores. On Christmas Eves at 9 PM, after a tree seller closed his operation on a vacant lot, they took home an unsold tree and decorated it; hey, no one else was gonna buy it.

Jake routinely went to a McDonald’s dumpster at 11:15 AM, pulled out the packaged and just-thrown-out Egg McMuffins, and consumed all-you-can-eat breakfasts. He often dealt in used goods. He bought stuff at yard sales and he salvaged items from peoples’ garbage, told me these had surprising value and sold such apparent junk to antique dealers. Jake also introduced me to the Salvation Army Thrift Store, where he, and I suppose his mother and siblings, bought much of their clothes. Jake’s family often had an unrelated, rent-paying boarder in their basement.

When he took the train to New York City, Jake jumped the subway turnstiles. The cops nabbed him. His uncle, an NYC lawyer, intervened to prevent him from having a police record. Jake’s maternal grandfather was a Park Avenue physician. I visited his surviving grandmother’s spacious pre-War apartment between East 92nd and 93rd Streets. It had to be worth a fortune.

Jake’s affluent grandparents disapproved of Jake’s mother’s choice of husbands and didn’t support her thereafter.

—

One day, shortly before our Europe trip, Jake brought me to a flea market.

We met a merchant named Bobby, about seven years older than we were. Jake told Bobby about our upcoming trip. Bobby boasted about his many European one-night stands and told us of some of the best places, like Palma, Mallorca, to replicate his escapades. He also talked about his time as a Vietnam War infantryman.

Both sets of stories seemed fake to me. Bobby had an insouciance about his Nam experience that I didn’t hear from other vets. The sex stories seemed too easy and given Bobby’s appearance, especially improbable. As Jake and I left the market, I expressed to Jake my doubts about Bobby’s veracity.

—

A week or two later, Jake and I began vagabonding in Europe. We had no credit cards; they didn’t use to issue these to twenty-year-olds with minimum-wage jobs. We learned that, in order to buy stuff, we had to go to a bank and exchange our traveler’s cheques for each nation’s currency. We also learned that Euro banks had many obscure holidays, on which they were unexpectedly closed.

One weekday, we hitch-hiked to Newhaven on England’s southern coast. From there, in that pre-Chunnel era, we planned to take the four-hour ferry to Dieppe, France. But we found out it was another bank holiday. We were out of cash and hungry. Jake suggested that we forage through a dumpster in the alley behind a food store. We found various items there, none of them appetizing. But we gleaned a batch of raw potatoes and plastic bags of frozen peas.

Without money, we had to wait until the next day to take the ferry. Because it was cold and rainy, we slept alone in the ferry’s waiting room. The room was cold too, even though we tried to warm our bodies by sitting against the vertical steam pipes. To thaw the peas, we ran the bags under hot water and ate them. Europe on zero dollars a day.

In the morning, we got cash and caught the first boat we could. Still hungry and seeing that the ship had a snack bar, Jake had an idea. He said, “I’m going to take these (potatoes) to the snack bar and ask the cook if he’ll fry them for us.”

I made a face and said, “No way he’s doing that.”

Unfazed, Jake walked away and said, “Wait here.”

Twenty minutes later, on the lightly-crowded boat, Jake re-appeared, his second-hand army jacket bulging. Saying only “Pssst!” he opened the jacket on one side, as if exposing contraband, and unveiled two large, stacked, paper plates of sliced, steaming, golden-brown, deep-fried potatoes. He shared one plate with me. It was deliciously salty and greasy. We wolfed it down and quickly became full.

Shortly thereafter, a dozen school-blazer-wearing British 14-year-old schoolboys on a class trip walked by, chatted with us and admired the remaining fried potatoes. Jake offered to sell them the full plate. They pooled their pence and handed their coins over. Jake passed them the fries. Win-win.

—

On this and other occasions, I admired Jake’s resourcefulness. It was a subtext to our friendship that Jake was street-smarter than I was. I basked in his reflected hipness and learned from him.

Still, Jake was often naive. Maybe coming from an unusual household made Jake more willing to believe in the improbable, like talking a short-order cook into frying found potatoes or believing stories about Vietnam jungle fighters. Maybe having a no-nonsense, high-school grad, army-vet, factory-working father, as I did, grounded me in a way that Jake’s college-educated, absentee father didn't. For whatever reason, Jake was simultaneously slicker but more credulous than I was.

When we returned from our trip, Jake reconnected with Bobby, who hired him to help sell toys at Englishtown New Jersey’s Saturday mega-flea market. The money was easy and off-the-books. Between the hour-plus drive each way and the market itself, Jake and Bobby had plenty of time to hang out; having someone to tell stories to was probably half the reason Bobby hired him. Jake would occasionally tell me of Bobby’s intense Vietnam accounts. I re-expressed my skepticism.

—

Two or three years later, out-of-the-blue, Jake asked, “You know that guy Bobby I used to do the flea markets with? He just died of a heart attack. I went to his wake and met his wife. I said to her, ‘Bobby had a hard life. All that stuff he went through in Vietnam…’”

Jake said Bobby’s wife sighed, frowned, shook her head and replied, “He told you those stories, too? Bobby never went to Vietnam.”

Jake was crestfallen. Finishing his story to me, Jake shook his head and said “Dude, you were right.”

—

From a young age, I heard other kids say stuff that seemed false. My skepticism has continued as the decades passed; kids became teens and then adults and misrepresented different stuff. People can say—or print— whatever they want, usually without negative consequences for exaggerating, leaving out facts or outright lying. Thus, people often bend the truth or just make stuff up.

When I listen or read, I presume that anything that seems unusual is in some way false. Depending on what someone says, I hold open the possibility that it’s true. But I don’t act in reliance on someone’s unlikely say-so until it’s well-verified. This is true even if—especially if—the media and/or the government presents the information. See, e.g., the past five-and-a-half years.

Hide from other people and wear a mask when I walk around? You’re gonna have to prove to me that I should do something as weird as that.

I thought everyone took roughly the same approach to the improbable. I found out in March 2020 that they didn’t.

—-

I’m still angry about the Scamdemic. I’m angry about its harm to those I love and to the millions I would love if I got to know them. I’m angry about the isolation—both then, and now, as work-from-home continues for many—the lost experiences and the further impoverishment of the poor and the middle-class. It’s also hard to think every day, as I do, that injected people I love might be carrying a time bomb inside them or that the shots may have sterilized them.

A reader named Steve visited me last weekend. As the dozens of readers I’ve met and dozens more with whom I’ve spoken on the phone characteristically are, Steve was well-adjusted and not organically depressed.

Nonetheless, he said, “I’m still angry about what happened. I don’t ever want to stop being angry.”

I agreed. But Steve and I also agreed that life is short and that we should enjoy doing things while we can still do them. It’s not helpful to be angry around-the-clock.

When I emailed Steve a few days later and thanked him for visiting, I asked him what, specifically, made him the angriest about the whole thing. He wrote:

Although I've been losing trust in the honesty/integrity of our government for about 20 years, I was angry because the covid scam was a much bolder move of ridiculous rules, lies, manipulation, intimidation, economic/physical threats, censorship and information control. It was something that I had never seen before. It was much worse than I imagined. It was dystopian. It was coordinated between the government, the media, the medical industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the education system. I was angry because the propaganda and intimidation worked on so many people and those people turned on the people that saw it as a scam. It exposed our system as something that I didn't think it was and it worked too well. Even though most people on the planet are living the best lives that has ever been achieved in the history of the world, I can't unsee what is beneath the veneer of our system.

Very well said.

As did Steve, I knew governments lied often and that many people are clueless. And since mid-March 2020, I’ve known I was being lied to.

But these lies directly worsened my life and the lives of those around me. I expected other people to see the Scam. Few did. The past five-and-a-half years have shown me that many, like Jake, who are in various ways, canny, can’t detect lies, even when they’re obvious. It’s been painful to watch.

Every day since March 15, 2020, I’ve wished for people to snap out of their delusion. For the first few months, I expected them to. Most never did. The only way they might ever see the Covid lies is if, as with Bobby’s wife, some celebrity “public health” insider tells them it was a scam. Even then, I’m not sure the Coronamanic would admit they were duped. Their ego forbids it.

Peoples’ Covid gullibility would have been bad enough if this trait only victimized them. They alone would have suffered the consequences of their naivete. But during Coronamania, the viral mob members demanded that everyone be as naive as they were.

Worst of all, though less numerous, many who saw the Scam acted as if it was real in order to advance personal, political or economic objectives. They liked telecommuting from their parents’ vacation house. So they stayed silent as kids were kept home for 18 months and grandmas died alone from despair when no one came to see them.

I see people differently now. It’s disturbing and disorienting to be surrounded by legions who are easily misled by their government and the media or are so out for themselves that they’ll victimize others by going along with a lie.

The government’s arrogance and mendacity and the majority’s embrace of the Scamdemic has created in me profound pessimism about the human prospect. If the government and media can pull off this Scam, and most people not only tolerated it but still act as if it was worthwhile, there’s no limit to what top-down harm can be done. Since March, 2020, deep, irreparable damage has already been done.

Thus, I live most of each day in a state of distraction: playing basketball with the Y boyz, pulling down my guitar or playing my piano, spending time with Ellen, making and eating food, fixing broken stuff and writing these posts.

On its face, it’s a good life. But given what I choose daily to overlook, it feels inauthentic. I put one foot in front of the other, say some prayers and watch some dog videos. I wonder how many are AI-generated.