Author: admin

In 2016 Emory Professor Carol Andersen released a text called White Rage. The book, written by a black woman, was largely ignored by the people who needed to hear the information the most. The book broke down the response of an aggrieved white populous to what they felt was an assault on their way of life. She traced this call and response all the way back to the beginning of this country and what she calls structural racism. Her main thesis goes like this: African American progress is always met with white backlash. This goes back to the loss of a labor force (i.e. the end of slavery) and quickly erupted into the social and legal criminalization of blackness. Her argument is sound, thorough, and absolutely timely.

Her book came out the year we elected Donald Trump. That election was a clear cut rebuke of the Clintons and the Obamas, as Trump’s foul-mouthed rallies did all they could to gin up anger to what had ‘been done’ to America and argued that he was the only person who could Make America Great Again. Well, is this the great America he hoped for? Instead I think the last 3.5 years have been a massive backlash for 8 years under Obama and the hyper-polarization and vitriol that followed his election in 2008. Fox News built a brand around divisive rhetoric at the expense of their pursuit of the truth. Now, as the election nears, we see more and more stations and websites following that mold. We see people like Rush Limbaugh, who is a known conspiracy pedaler who claimed repeatedly that Covid-19 was no worse than the common cold and openly dismisses the notion of consent in sexual relationships, be awarded the Medal of Freedom.

The argument here is also clear: You black and brown people get a step up and we will show you in no uncertain terms who this country belongs to.

So perhaps that is the question: does America belong to one group? Is it meant to be a place for all creeds and colors to gather and find freedom? Whatever we become, it shouldn’t be what we are now. What we are now is a reflection of some of the darkest societies in the world. We are narcissists and we are racists and elitists and extreme in our views. We are not what America should be.

There is this person out there in the world who makes rosters for fun. They made a madden 21 roster stuffed full of the hopes and dreams of football lovers everywhere. I played that roster. I started an entire new franchise based around the Madden 21 New York Giants roster.

And I lost my first game.

It was the Cowboys. It felt about right. We still had no secondary and no real chance to stop the receiving corps. Each of the three starters scored a TD and the TE did all kinds of work. It pissed me off something awful. Now Barkley went off too. He recorded a ton of yards from the ground and through catches, but the fact remains that we lost. We lost because we had no secondary. Maybe I can attribute it to my lack of skill on the D side of the ball, but I want to be clear: I was in position at the start of the play and speed pulled me out of position quickly. We just slow like that. We just bad like that. I just struggle with the hope end of things as a result now. This is gonna be something to worry about throughout the possible upcoming season.

Yeah, Covid-19 is really still out there, in spite of our open refusal to stay indoors or perhaps because of it. We are out in the streets protesting and rioting and getting manhandled by the police and, to quote a famous SNL skit, “Ain’t nuthin gonna happen.”

So, we ought to be staying home and getting right. The message has been sent and now the real work needs to be done in the boardrooms and the courtrooms of America, where something can happen. We should get right so we can come out and vote in November and handle business as we were meant to handle business.

” I love you” He said. Her face scrunched up in that specific way that made him think she was about to cry. He started to say something else but his brain, little more than a biological computer with no real emotional intelligence beyond that which she fed to him or he picked up from the constant feed of bad television relationships had already ceased functioning in a rational way. That computer did not recognize how the facial input followed the verbal statement and thus he did not know how to act.

“I love you too.” She said, and then she turned away. He didn’t know if she was going to cry. He watched her walk away from him, their small bedroom becoming it’s own de-militarized zone; her footsteps soft pops on the cold tile. He was going into the bathroom and she was going into her annex. He’d tried to name the space her ‘Apertif’ because it sounded cool. She decided not to name it, because she hadn’t found a name she was comfortable with. It was her space, not his just as the bathroom was his space, not hers. The biological computer that he called a brain processed those two variables and openly wondered if this was language and thought she put to the spaces or, like everything else, was this his own interpretation and by that he meant, misinterpretation.

The stained glass double doors shut behind her and he wondered again if she was crying and what it meant when someone cried when you told them you loved them.

Some Thoughts:

1. Well, that character clearly has a lot to work on emotionally.

I am angry. Everyone I see on TV and on social media is angry for one reason or another. We’ve gone over the tipping point and the result has been extremely violent. Today authorities fired tear gas and rubber bullets into a crowd of protesters in front of the White House, ostensibly so the president could have a photo-op walk to a nearby church that caught fire. It makes sense on the part of security–you don’t know who is in the crowd and a threat, so if the president is walking out there, you gotta take them out. Only, that entire situation is the result of a president who doesn’t think about anything but his ego and optics. So, yeah, I am angry.

I am angry at the looters who are making everyone else protesting look bad while stealing the spotlight. I am angry at police for the institutionalized racism that created this situation. This is a known and has been for the entire history of the United States. We were stupid to even speak out loud that having a black president somehow indicated all that had changed. It indicated progress and a shift in voting power. That’s all.

So, I am angry, drained, and unsure how to move from this moment. I think we all are.

Some Thoughts:

1. Might be moving–not from the moment but from my home of nearly a decade.

The moment I knew was coming was close and I still wasn’t quite prepared to see it again. I pressed pause. I thought about the woman sitting in the holding cell only yards away. Was she a criminal? Maybe. I could justify what happened to her boyfriend. The bomb incident felt more like wrong place wrong time to me, but the car? She hadn’t been driving. The accident report was clear about what happened. Her injuries were consistent with what she said happened, but still. I knew what she was. I wasn’t entirely sure I believed what my own experience was telling me, but it told me that there was more going on here.

I pressed play.

Calloway was pressing her hard. Even from this angle where I could hardly see his face I could see the spittle flying from his lips. His thinning hair shook as he nodded, saying, “You killed him, didn’t you?!”

She hadn’t asked for a lawyer. Not yet. Her expressions flickered between calm and anger so fast that it felt like a strobe effect. I sucked in a breath, and then it happened. Her body tensed as if she meant to lash out at the man. Her face was contorted into rage, and then it wasn’t. I stopped the footage. I ran it back frame by frame. The department didn’t spare expenses on the systems in Interrogation 1 and 2. We all knew that perps slipped up in spaces like this and we needed to catch everything. I don’t anyone would have thought we’d catch this.

Minute 11.1216 and 11.1219 defied reality. I used the arrow key to skip between each frame. In those microseconds her body was moving towards the detective and then, at once she was back where she started as though hitting pause in real life, rewinding, and setting herself right again. She went from angry to calm, just like that.

I used the arrows to move back and forth between the frames over and over again. I just could not understand how it happened. A technical glitch? No, it was a glitch of another kind. A genetic one. A reality glitch that allowed this strange young woman to shift backwards; to rewind herself and her actions. How and why coalesced into a gray haze in my mind.

Even if she hadn’t killed him, hadn’t been responsible, she was something entirely different from the reality I understood.

Some Thoughts:

1. I’m thinking about calling this Revision vs. Rewind. It gives less away.
2. I will also revise this and see what can be done with it. I might drop it on Daily Science Fiction and see what responses I get.
3. Yes, the ending sucks.

I meant to finish my story, but I could not write about that this night. Tomorrow I promise myself I will switch focus, but as fires sprout across the country. In Seattle there is a 5 pm curfew to curb violence. In New York I watched a cop car ram a crowd of people. In Salt Lake City I watched a man respond to someone touching his car by pulling out a hunting bow and attempting to shoot before being attacked and beaten horribly by a crowd of men and women. His car was burned moments later as SLC cops looked on. Our country is losing its collective mind. So much for social distancing, eh? We hardly have time for the conversation in light of so much horrific violence. This is not about what it started out about. I said that before but it is awfully clear now that this thing has taken on a life of its own. A lot of it is winding up on social media and mingling with a great deal of misinformation.

This is an extremely dangerous time for America. The polarization I feared is taking place. Twice since I posted I’ve heard about or seen civilians taking matters into their own hands and striking out at rioters. We are nearing a tipping point and all the while this virus is poised to make a hard comeback. Things have not looked so bleak in a long time. I am hoping leadership is able to step up to the challenge and bring us back together.

I don’t want to get too far away from Rewind. There is a part 4 coming, and I know that if I let it sit for too long, I will move on. There is a balance to be struck there: It is fine to step away from a story to let it cool on the back burner, but if you let it sit too long it is forgotten or the energy driving the writing is utterly lost. Yesterday I needed to step back and decide how to continue (day 2 was initially deep in my mind for final act and I was supposed to write a different scene idea for day 2, but yeah. 10 minutes later…) Today I need to step back for another reason entirely. I am seeing violence in the streets. I am nervous, and I need to speak to this feeling.

A long time ago I was at Iowa State University. I was participating in the VEISHEA festival. That simple week of partying turned into senseless rioting. I mean senseless. There was nothing to riot about. I learned later that it had happened ten years prior and then it happened again in ’14. All were triggered by small groups of people angry about something or other and everyone else piled in because they had some anger on their mind and a need to express it. This is precisely how riots work. This is also how they spread. In the time of rampant social media, they spread faster and farther. In the time of Covid-19 just about everyone has something to be pissed off about. As a result, we are seeing a swell of anger and violence that started off being about the death of black people at the hands of cops or vigilantes and the clear cut difference in how black people like myself are perceived and approached vs the lack of fear surrounding white people (See Michigan armed protests and more). The NYT argues that America is a Tinderbox, and they are correct.

Now that the economy has slowed to the point where we are without distractions we are facing the reality of the polarization of this clearly crumbling nation and we are flailing. This is not the end but the beginning of a long and dangerous period in America and I am truly worried about where we go from here. It doesn’t take much for people to decide to take matters into their own hands. What happens when we decide to choose sides and that open polarization erupts into violence against each other along more than just party lines? In Ames, IA there was not much to be mad about save for clear cut boredom. In today’s America we have a great deal more to be pissed about. I don’t see it ending well.

I started re-watching Robotech as part of our in-home Covid Comicon. There is a lot that transpires in that show and for the most part, it is groundbreaking. Still, other stuff just doesn’t hold up. Going back after all these years was eye opening.

Let’s start with the implicit LGBTQ relationships. There are no spoilers here, but there is at least one implied relationship. Add to that the interracial relationship featured by mid season and you have yourself a show that pushes the boundaries.

That is not always a good thing. The female love interest (I hesitate to call her a protagonist as she always feels secondary in terms of quality of storytelling) has a very gratuitous nude scene and it is made clear both before and after that she is supposed to be a 16 year old girl.

Going beyond the ick factor, there are all sorts of odd patriarchal undertones throughout. None of these were challenged by me, and it felt very much like how anime still goes. I have to acknowledge that being a man and being nostalgic about the material did influence my thinking and understanding.

That is all I have the mind for so far.

Calloway conducted the 3rd interview. I was off duty that night and heard about it the next morning. He hadn’t been involved in the second interview. Bomb cases usually go federal, and that one supposedly being an accident didn’t raise too many hackles. In truth, my interview had only been procedure until I met her. The 3rd interview was another matter entirely. It was four years to the month after the first, and I swear she looked like she’d aged a dozen years or more. The smile lines at the corners of her mouth and eyes had deepened into crevices and the bags beneath the eyes bore the luggage of pain and suffering. He brought her into Interview 2, as he and I both had before. She wasn’t cuffed. There wasn’t evidence for that yet.

I cued up the tape on the laptop and then paused to take a sip of my coffee. It’d gone cold long ago, but the motion took my mind off of what I knew I was going to see–what I didn’t want to see. I steeled myself, lowered my trembling hand to the keyboard and pressed enter. The tape began as the others had.

He started with a few simple questions, asking her if she knew why she was brought in and if this was her first time here. She answered quickly, rolling her eyes and pretending to be bored at first. He changed tactics quickly.

He said, “Did you kill your boyfriend, Ms. Parker?”

She froze, unable to answer for a moment. She pursed her lips and closed her eyes and finally said, “I can’t believe you’d ask me that. I didn’t kill anyone.”

He pressed on, offering more questions, sprinkling in bits of speculation about the man who’d actively abused her all those years ago and this new boyfriend who’d disappeared two days prior. She was growing angrier, firing back answers at first and then, more reservedly answering–always that same hint of anger in her tone. Still, there was something off. You could see it faintly in the way her lips pursed before certain questions, as if she were trying to remember the answer. But how can you remember the answer to a question that hasn’t been asked?

Some Thoughts:

1. I don’t know that I’ll do a part 4 but the secret is largely exposed here in part 3. I just have to explain the how if I do a 4… we shall see.

My palms were moist when I pressed play on the second arrest. I saw myself enter the camera frame in that worn suit jacket I can’t seem to stop wearing. I was holding a file in one hand and tousling my hair in the other, trying to look disinterested in the perp. I sat in front of her, took a deep breath, and said, “Do you know what you’re here for?”

“No.” She wasn’t handcuffed this time. She was drumming her fingers and watched them move rather than meet my eyes. The scrapes and cuts on the back of her hands were still fresh. I slid the file under her fingers. She kept drumming.

“Aren’t you curious to see what that is?” I said.

“I don’t even know why I’m here. I didn’t do anything.”

“Maybe.” I leaned back in my metal framed chair, trying to look casual, but I was curious. The photo in the folder showed her looking directly at the camera. She was the only person who did that when it happened. I said, “Let me guess, wrong place wrong time?”

“Yeah, maybe. Or I’m just really unlucky.”

“I’d call you extremely lucky. That bomb went off less than fifteen feet away from you and you got away with barely a scratch.”

The drumming was a metronomic tap that filled the silence that followed my words. It went on like that for better than a minute of tape before she said, “Can I go?”

I couldn’t hold her. I didn’t have anything real. I didn’t even know about the first tape then. Once I saw the third tape I knew I had something. I just didn’t know what.