Done

It feels like a break-up -- a break-up where a ground troop invasion, drone strikes, MX missiles and nuclear detonations are possible final outcomes.

Reflecting on the unprovoked trade war the United States of America recently launched against Canada, I cannot decide which is worse: the sheer malignant arbitrariness of this heinous economic aggression, the abject stupidity of it, or the weeny-whiny reaction of American officials over Canada's response.

The worst part about all of this -- and there are about fourteen "worst parts" to all of this -- is the aggressive rumblings from America, the insults against my prime minister, against my country (51st state? "Not a real country" in the words of Elon Musk, the white South African) bends my mind uncomfortably toward generalizations, to thinking of Americans as one composite odious personage. 

Former AIG CEO Maurice Greenberg who lived by the saying: 

"All I want is an unfair advantage." He was lauded in American 

business circles for this attitude

I have lived cheek-by-jowl with America nearly my entire life. I have worked in America -- about nine years in total. Some of my closest, dearest friends and family are American. These are people I love. There is no question in my mind they are as appalled as I am about what is transpiring between our countries.

What brought this into starkest focus for me, however, was an experience the other day: interviewing a public person whose work I have enjoyed for more than forty years; a guy I admire and like (and that's why I'm being vague about his identity).

It was a great interview. Not only did I get the information I sought, but my interview subject adorned it all with some really entertaining stories. I felt great at the end of our hour-long call.

As I got ready to say goodbye, I told this person how much I enjoyed the American city in which he lives, that I have always felt like it was a part of my neighbourhood.

The person I admired chuckled and said: "Well, that's good because I guess you're going to be the fifty-first state very soon!" 

He laughed like it was a great joke. The annexation of my country -- he thought the idea was hysterically funny.

I quietly choked and gaped and blinked, feeling a horrible vintage of bewilderment.

This person reiterated his joke a couple of more times. I was stunned.

It's not often that I am rendered speechless, but that's how this person's comments left me -- all the good feeling and admiration draining out of the whole experience. 

That guy became just another pixel in the composite face of America forming in my mind.

The New York Times reports today that Donald Trump believes the reasoning behind the Canada/U.S. border isn't sound. He also wants to re-examine the treaties both countries have signed regarding the way in which the Great Lakes are shared.

Given Donald's affinity for blood-drenched Russian leader Vladimir Putin, there is no question Donald's version of annexation of Canada would closely resemble Russia's attempt in the Ukraine: an ugly, heinous, hellish mess.

It is a thought that doesn't fit in my mind: there are people in America who want to do this to my country, where my family and I live, where my kids go to school, where my parents are living out their last years, where my friends, neighbours, and fellow citizens are just going about our lives.

All the usual stops and mental safeguards I normally bump up against when considering the lunacy of the United States have vanished. I know what America did in Vietnam. I know what it did in Guatemala, in Iran, in Chile, in El Salvador, in Angola, Panama, in Iraq (twice), Afghanistan. 

I've seen the documentaries Hearts & Minds and Winter Soldier and a hundred others showing America's depravity. 

To think that America's war in Vietnam occurred when there were smart people running the government. Certainly, President Lyndon Johnson was no scholar, but among other people, there was Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy at the spear tip of the Vietnam debacle. McNamara had been one of the most successful corporate executives in the country, heading Ford Motor Company, before taking up his role as senior warmonger with the government. The problem was, McNamara possessed no soul, no human compassion, and unapologetically clutched to his numbers as justification for war crimes to his dying day. McGeorge Bundy achieved a perfect score on his entrance exam to Yale University. He was regarded as a brilliant man, all the way around. In a scholarly paper arguing for America's entry into World War II, Bundy once wrote: "I believe in the dignity of the individual, in government by law, in respect for the truth, and in a good God; these beliefs are worth my life and more; they are not shared by Adolph Hitler."

And, yet, Bundy was a major architect of the Vietnam morass.

Former Sgt. William Marshall of Detroit, Michigan talking about American 

jets accidentally dropping napalm on American soldiers in Vietnam

I have read extensively about the Americans' love of waterboarding and its concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

It was with horror and bewilderment that I followed Russia's invasion of the Ukraine in the news. What the Russian military lacked in modern, workable equipment, competence, and logistics, they made up for with sheer barbarity.

After what I have read and seen of America and it's gore-filled foreign military adventures, I have no doubt their attempts to annex Canada would yield much the same destructive, futile results. I mean, a white South African is a central adviser to Donald, whose own cruelty needs no stoking.

Donald's accusations that Canada isn't doing enough to stem the flow of fentanyl into America reminds me of George W. Bush's allegations against Saddam Hussein, the blood-drenched dictator of Iraq (someone, for whom, I do not hold an ounce of sympathy), possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). America was desperate to pin the September 11, 2001 attacks on Iraq to justify an invasion so the U.S. could steal Iraq's oil. 

I remember Colin Powell humiliating himself at the United Nations "making America's case for war" against Iraq. There was no case.

Saddam Hussein said he did not have WMDs. America said he was lying. Saddam Hussein allowed UN weapons inspectors into Iraq to search for the weapons. When no WMDs were found, America said Saddam was hiding them. And then, making it seem as though they had no choice (when they had a multitude of other options), America moved forward with the action they planned to take from the beginning: launching a bloody, unilateral, illegal war, which made up in barbarity what it lacked in actual facts to justify it.

Comedian Bill Hicks speaking truth in the early 1990s

'Murica all the way!

Now, the surreal personage of Donald Trump leads America. 

When dealing with a superficial person, why not begin with a superficial appraisal? The man is orange. A grown man, vain as the devil himself, wears Tan-In-A-Can, as some pathetic attempt at adding pigment to his prissy pink countenance. This reminds me of a scene from the film Talk Radio, in which actor Eric Bogosian, says on the air (as a guest on an established talk show host's show) that white people spend hundreds of millions of dollars on suntan lotion each year because they actually want to be black, because they feel sexually inferior to black people, and that imitating their skin colour will make them equal. 

So it is -- the hardened racist, Donald Trump, adding colour to his colourless hide, feigning potency, asserting his dominance among gourde vegetables.

So, now, America -- a country that can't pay its bills (just ask China) -- is led by a man who has never paid his bills. The American voting public has chosen this grifter as their national symbol, their leader, mocking and denigrating every positive thing their country ever stood for in the past. And this septic goon now has his eye on my country.

Strange as it may sound, I can almost understand why the American voting public elected him twice as the president of the United States.

America refuses to deal with its traumatic past. Sure, it rhapsodizes about the great Civil War when the gallant gentleman of the South made their brave last stand to preserve their hallowed institution of slavery, but otherwise, the national narrative of the United States has been one, long disingenuous conversation. Time and again, the "official narrative" of shocking events, national tragedies, does not match the testimony of eye witnesses and researchers.

Questions were never resolved about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the assassination of Malcolm X, of Martin Luther King, Jr., of Robert Kennedy. To this day, the depths of the Watergate scandal have never been plumbed, much as the subject has been superficially raked-over ad nauseum. The true reasons for the American invasion of Vietnam need to be fully explored, particularly the bogus "Gulf of Tonkin" incident. The October Surprise has never been looked at in any depth. The Iran/Contra scandal remains opaque. Same with the 2,400 service men America abandoned in southeast Asia after it cut and ran from Vietnam in 1973. Jeffrey Epstein.

Everything unpleasant in American life is labeled a "conspiracy theory," a term thrown around with the ease and frequency of  "Communist" in 1950s America. Just because the accusation is made doesn't make it so.

The overwhelming feeling in America is that every person in authority is lying to the general public.

So, in 2016, a startlingly large segment of the American voting public said: "OK, if you're all liars, then we will elect the most bald-faced, easily-debunked, unapologetic scoundrel and liar in the land!"

Donald Trump fit that bill perfectly.

More than that, it seems to me that the American public (77 million of them, at least) have reached their final pain point with American life: the murderous game of Musical Chairs that life in the country has devolved into. Ransoming healthcare to the public. The school system that has been sliding into an abyss for decades. The school shootings. The mass shootings. Its lapdog, complacent, complicit, propagandist media.

Having reached this apex of pain and outrage, Donald's 77 million are doing what other outraged people have done in the past when they reached their pain threshold: they are burning down their own neighbourhoods. It happened in Watts in 1965. It occurred during the 1967 Detroit Riots. After Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in April 1968, communities around the nation were burned to the ground. It happened again during the LA Riots of 1992.

And that's what Donald Trump supporters are doing to America in 2025, mocking the office of the presidency, smearing the government with feces, giving the middle finger to a society they believe has failed them. And in the heat of their madness, they cheer their miscreant on. 

As though to mock the pain suffered at the hands of bad bosses, the humiliation of lost jobs (which also means loss of healthcare coverage in America), Donald has given the richest man in the world a position where he can axe American jobs -- and axe them, he does, by the hundred thousand, with the indiscriminate malice of a drive-by-shooter. 

The process is framed with some meaningless language, but the upshot is that for the first time, the American voting public has chosen its tormentor, and from the depths of its self-loathing, they cheer him on. They find no fault with him. Their devotion to Dear Leader borders on suicidal.

And now this self-pitying horde of willfully ignorant people cheer Donald as he trains his muddled sights on Canada, which hasn't caused the United States one bit of bother since the War of 1812. Certainly, the fragile American ego cannot handle someone disagreeing with it -- and Canada has, at times, disagreed with some of America's bloodier, more egregious foreign military adventures -- but aside from those isolated incidents we have been an agreeable neighbour.

With his followers believing he is playing 5D chess, Donald hit Canadian goods with exorbitant tariffs. In the ongoing tragicomedy of American political life, part of Donald's shifting rationale for this was that previous agreement between Canada and the U.S. was a horrendous "deal" shamelessly slanted toward Canada's benefit -- of course, omitting the fact that he, Donald Trump, negotiated this deal in his previous term as American president.

So, on Tuesday of this week, Donald slapped tariffs on Canadian goods. 

The Canadian response was more than a little heartening to Canadians. Our leaders who are so often the source of dismay, disappointment, and dyspepsia, rose to the occasion -- in shocking fashion.

So shocking, in fact, the Americans are now playing the victim. You know, how they did in Vietnam? In Iraq. In Afghanistan. The poor, aggrieved self-proclaimed Super Power, the only nation to use nuclear weapons against other human beings, perpetrators of countless unjustified horrors -- they... they are the precious defenseless little lambs be assailed by a brute.

That is the Americans' ultimate weapon: their complete and utter lack of reason, their contempt for reality, their undying devotion to "moving the goal posts," their disingenuousness, their gaslighting, their disdain for the truth, for what is right, for what is just. 

It's not enough that they burn down their own neighbourhood, they now want to burn down ours.

I am very pleased and proud to say, my interpretation of Canada's response to America has been: 

Go fuck yourselves!

I get it, the American people are in extreme existential pain. They live in a Second World country that keeps telling them its the greatest nation in the history of all creation. I have watched their decline for decades. American life has curdled for a great number of its citizens. Just look -- the CEO of a healthcare company was gunned down on a New York City sidewalk in December last year (shot in the back no less) and the overwhelming response from the American public was one of cheers, lauding the murderer, calling for his freedom. This is what life in America has devolved into. It is only human nature wanting to strike back at the authors of their misery.

Donald is their Molotov cocktail.

Amid this sprawling debacle, the quietest villains are very nearly the worst: the Democratic Party in the United States.

The Democratic Party has been an absolute enigma to me ever since I began following news closely, during the 1992 presidential election that elevated Bill Clinton to the White House. 

The Democrats are duly sanctimonious, they furrow their brows at most of the right times, they demonstrate some skill in making sounds that mimic compassion. They talk a good game. But I have never seen a group of seemingly intelligent people so consistently self-sabotage themselves. They often suffer from High Road Hypoxia as the Republicans spin circles around them. These limousine liberals simply do not have the courage of their convictions. 

Just think of it -- Donald Trump is very likely the last American president of 85-year-old Nancy Pelosi will ever know. At least her stock portfolio has benefited so greatly from insider trading.

So, we're left with this horrible stalemate, at the moment. I'm left with a feeling that two timelines in the multiverse are colliding, like those merging galaxies photographed by the Webb telescope. To think the American government is ruled by people who admire Nazis...

Actually, not so surprising when one considers another aspect of American history that Americans refuse to look at -- the time Prescott Bush, father of president George H.W. Bush and grandfather to president George W. Bush, approached Retired Major General Smedley Butler (who was at that time the most decorated soldier in U.S. history) with his wealthy cronies in 1933 asking for his help in overthrowing the government of president Franklin D. Roosevelt. Major General Butler did the right thing, strung those traitors along and then revealed the plot -- only to be vilified, himself, and watched the seditionists continue with their lives unbothered by consequences.

The strangest part of this nightmare is the unity it has wrought in Canada. "Elbows up" is the rallying cry, and our complacency and reliance on the United States is being re-examined with an eye toward making major changes.

My hope lies in the tremendous, demonstrated incompetence of Donald Trump. My hope lies in the obvious hubris of Elon Musk. Anything Donald Trump has ever been associated with during his entire misbegotten life has failed. Among other low lights of his business career, he has squandered away a fortune worth hundreds of millions of dollars inherited from his father and bankrupted two casinos in Atlantic City.

More concretely, my hope lies in the intelligence, resourcefulness, patriotism, and resilience of Canadians. We do not back down from bullies. We've never sought to be the toughest kid on the block, but it would most certainly be a mistake to underestimate us and our love for Canada. It took no time at all for several American officials to be knocked back on their heels by Canada's response to their economic aggression. This is how we do.

Reason 429,313 Why I Could Never Be a Doctor (and not just because I don't really like people)

International traveller among Niagara’s eight new COVID-19 cases 

Patient X languished in his hospital bed, sweaty, feverish, miserable.  

Dr. Gnaukweirst entered the room.

“Doc, you gotta help me!”  Patient X said.  “I feel like I’m dying!”

“Your tests have come back,” Dr. Gnaukweirst said.  “I’m afraid it’s not good news.”

“What is it, Doc?  What have I got?”

“You have COVID-19,” Dr. Gnaukweirst said.

“Oh my God,” Patient X lamented.  “But that’s impossible!”

“That’s always how it seems,” Dr. Gnaukweirst said. “But it is a certainty.  We’ve run several tests.  You have COVID-19.”

“But it’s impossible!  I’ve done everything right!  I check Facebook every five minutes.  I read and upload memes.  I take selfies.”

“Have you worn a mask when you go out of the house.  Have you practiced social distancing?”

Patient X mustered the strength to lean up on one elbow.  “Wear a mask?  And give away my freedoms?  Are you crazy?”  He fell back on his pillow.  Patient X would have then referenced Nazis and Jews, except he didn’t know enough about history to do so.  He had never heard of the Holocaust.

“And ‘social distancing’?”  Patient X said.  “Why would I do that if I don’t have COVID-19?”

“Except, you do.”

“But I didn’t!”

“You have it now,” Dr. Gnaukweirst said.  “Someone gave it to you.”

“Gave it to me?  That’s a conspiracy theory!  To make us wear masks!”

“Actually, it’s science.”

“I don’t know how that happened!”  Patient X moaned.

“We’re going to have to do contact tracing,” Dr. Gnaukweirst said.  “Have you been anywhere in public other than to grocery shop for bare essentials?”

“Been anywhere?”  Patient X said, mulling over the words.

“Yes, where there are other people.  We need to determine who you’ve been in contact with.”

“Well, I did get a really sweet deal on it trip to Europe three weeks ago.”

“Europe?!!”  

“Yeah, it’s that country across the ocean where they speak European and they pay for everything with U-ros.”

“You mean ‘Euros’?”

“Whatever.”

“So, you were out of the country.”

“Not for very long,” Patient said.  “Few weeks.”

“It didn’t dawn on you to maybe curtail travel outside of the country during a global pandemic?”

“And give away my freedoms?  No way!”

Dr. Gnaukweirst looked into the middle distance for a moment.  Here was yet another selfish, shortsighted miscreant who was too impatient to wait until the pandemic had passed in order to carry on with his life.  Whose actions, ironically enough, would prolong the pandemic that everyone was so weary of.

This is the specimen who has taken away my Chinese buffet, Dr. Gnaukweirst thought.  Who has made handshakes and hugs things of quaint old movies.  I'll never see Wayne Newton live, again, because of this son of a bitch.

“Come with me,” Dr. Gnaukweirst said.  “I have a special treatment for you.”

“What?”  Patient X moaned.  “I’m tired as hell and everything hurts!”

“Come on, you can do it,” Dr. Gnaukweirst said.  “I have exactly the thing for you.”

Patient X slowly, painfully shifted in his bed, eased his feet to the floor, wincing and gasping, squinting and muttering sweet self-pitying nothings to himself.  Dr. Gnaukweirst led him to the door.

Slowly -- ever so slowly -- they moved down the corridor.  Dr. Gnaukweirst led Patient X around a far corner to a disused hallway in the hospital.  At the end of it, there was an elevator.  As they approached, Patient X said, “Why are the elevator doors open, but no elevator there?”

“It’s not really an elevator,” Dr. Gnaukweirst said.  “There is a special prize in there for you.”

Patient X brightened slightly within his display of pain and discomfort.  “For me?”

“Just for you.”

As they got closer, Dr. Gnaukweirst stopped.  He coaxed Patient X to continue the final few feet.

“I don’t see anything,” Patient X said.  “Are you sure?  I should get back to my room.”  He moved to leave.

“There is a free iPhone in there for you,” Dr. Gnaukweirst said. 

Patient X’s face brightened.  “Are you kidding?  That’s great!”  He turned, wobbly, and moved toward the open elevator doors.  He looked into the darkened shaft.  “I don’t see anything.  Are you sure?”

“Oh, I’m sure,” Dr. Gnaukweirst said as he raised his right foot and placed it upon Patient X’s rump.  It felt good to do that.  Made him feel like Louis Armstrong when he first walked on the moon, and put one of his moon boots onto a moon rock and said, “I claim this planet in the name of Pink Floyd!”

Dr. Gnaukweirst launched Patient X into the open elevator shaft.  There was a momentary cry, but then it was gone.  Then, a distant thud, as Patient X landed on the pile of other COVIDiots and hypochondriacs Dr. Gnaukweirst had brought here.  One of the first to go in actually had an iPhone in her hand, so that hadn’t been a lie.

Dr. Gnaukweirst turned and went back to the ward and continued treating patients.

Donald Trump Photo-Op During Riots

The Forgotten Victims of COVID-19

As news media covers and world health experts combat the COVID-19 outbreak, there is a contingent of forgotten people who are left to suffer in silence and obscurity: the hypochondriacs.

"It's really hard," says Luc (not his real name).  "I'm usally in the ER two or three times a week because the tip of my nose is numb and I get headaches, and I just don't feel really good..."  He trails off, stares out the window of his rented room.  "But there's the fear."

It's a common thread among hypochondriacs -- fear of contracting an actual ailment by visiting the local hospital emergency room.  Under normal circumstances, it's a risk they are willing to take.  Since the worldwide COVID-19 outbreak, many are rethinking their ER visit schedules.

"It's hard," says Giselle (not her real name).  "I feel really, really... strange.  You know?  In my hands, and then the sensation moves up into my neck.  Sometimes I have to blink my eyes a few times to get them clear."  Giselle dabs her eyes with a tissue.  "What am I supposed to do?"

Federal and provincial governments have asked citizens to self-isolate, and to practice "social distancing" when in public.  News stories about hospitals overwhelmed with COVID-19 cases abound, as do stories of medical staff running low or completely out of supplies, such as masks, gowns and gloves.  Hospitals are soliciting donations from the public.

In the rush to treat the ever rising tide of COVID-19 cases, a major constituency of the medical landscape has been shunted aside -- the hypochondriacs who ordinarily populate the nation's ER waiting rooms with minor coughs, non-specific-non-life-threatening aches and pains, general malaise, minor rashes, strange taste in the mouth, a click in the shoulder when it's moved in a particular way.  The list of imaginary ailments is as varied as the hypochondriacs themselves.

One of the unforeseen consequences of the public anxiety surrounding COVID-19 is that the nation's ERs are much less busy.

"People are stressed," says Roda (not her real name).  "I don't want to go into my local ER, tell them my hair hurts and then get a fatal disease like coronavitis!"  She dabs her eyes with a tissue.  "So, if I want to stay alive, I have to stay away from the hospital!  That's so sick!  That's so backwards!"

At the time of publication, there is no word of an aid package for the nation's hypochondriacs by the federal government.

"We're left to fend for ourselves," says Xander (not his real name).  "Nobody cares.  It's like we don't exist."

There is talk in certain communities, among local activists, of opening faux clinics staffed by actors and volunteers to service the hypochondriacs, but currently efforts are hampered by self-isolation and social distancing orders.

In this time of need, spare a thought for those who believe they are afflicted.

Headbands In A Time Of Pestilence

"Let's enjoy these aimless days while we can..." —Don DeLillo White Noise
__________

It's all in the headband. I own a stretchy NBA headband and a bland blue stretchy headband. On this night, I choose to tie around my head a length of material torn from an old concert shirt that doesn't fit anymore.

People are not neutral about headbands.  It's one of the few statements in modern life that cannot shrugged away.  Strangers in the mall have gone out of their way to tell me: "You know, people don't wear those anymore."

I wear them.  While exercising, of course, but also to the grocery store, watching my kids at karate class, swimming, cutting the grass, checking the communal mailbox. I even have a smart black headband that I wear with my suit to job interviews.

My morning was spent trying to transfer funds from my bank account to my microwave oven. The unhelpful bank person on the phone told me it was impossible because my microwave oven does not have an email address. It does.

Because the markets are chewing the genitals off of my investments.  They are not, precisely, investments.  I think of investments as stocks that have been researched and then purchased after long sober thought.  I'm involved in funds, entangled in plans -- a plan.  A plan whose genitals are being chewed off by the stock market.

They're coming. They're coming for the toilet paper.  I crouch in the bushes in front of my house, headband secured around my head.  My hands grip an old shillelagh my grandfather brought back from Ireland decades ago. This is new Airborne Toxic Event. The Corona Virus -- COVID-19, which makes it sound like a video game -- is something else in this place that suffers no floods, tornadoes, hurricanes or earthquakes.  The worst we suffer are hard rains, terse looks in traffic, squirrels eating our tulip.

It was the absence of toilet paper in the supermarket, that told me, Shit's flying.  In the past, I avoided making that purchase of household goods out of a childish embarrassment, the tacit public admission that I, too, use toilets. But the Panic inspired by the absence of toilet paper, the miles long empty shelf in the supermarket, had nothing to do with commodal works.

If they -- faceless, nameless, without conscience they -- have ransacked the toilet paper aisle, I thought.  What is next?

I use exercise to deal with stress. You can always tell how terrible I feel by how good I look.

This time of pestilence is causing everyone stress because it reminds us all that we are going to die, at some point.  That death will come like a thief in the night even if it comes in the form of a Honda during the day.

The virus is causing trouble not only by making people sick, it's challenging our distractions.  Professional sports are gone.  Public gatherings are finished.  Even going to bars and restaurants is against the public conscience.  We are left with 1970s-era distractions: TV, Internet, cell phones, board games... conversation...  No doubt, there are people beginning to think that death would be preferable.

One of my distractions is riding my stationary bike. Some friends say, "How can you do it, day after day?  You don't go anywhere."

And I wonder, How do you say if I don't go anywhere why am I always different when I get off the bike again?

I also hear: "You don't see people wearing headbands at the gym."

"People still work out at gyms?"  I said.

You are what you do for free. You are what you do when it cost you to do it. You're not a doctor, or a cab driver, or a landscaper. You're a stamp collector, hunter, or a ventriloquist. And when you do it while wearing a headband, you do it with verve.

My nightly vigil is nearly done.  I really feel like I've gotten to know myself while crouching in the bushes.  Who cares if I sleep away the day.  The toilet paper can keep itself safe in the sunlight.

Corona Virus Days - 1st Fiction of the 2020 Corona Virus Outbreak

Reddit "Shower Thought" 3/17/2020:

Due to the earth's rotation, it's orbit around the sun and the suns [sic] orbit in the galaxy, you are the only human who ever has, or ever will occupy your current location in the universe.

Corona Virus Date 0034 days:

Pod battened. Wife objects to my referring to house as "pod".  I apologize, but explain that science fiction times call for science fiction language.

Sixteenth angry tweet directed at Netflix has gone unanswered. Requesting they stream 60s and 70s era home movies made by their viewers.  No word.  They may be suffering.

Toilet paper toilet paper store: +2313 squares.

Progress of toilet paper shrine to Don Delillo is slow. Using far too much in its construction.  There are complaints, dissension.

Corona Virus Date 0037 days:

Idea for a story came while riding my stationary bike in the basement:

Family living in a house during Corona Virus outbreak (write what you know). One day, the hapless husband opens the fuse box for the first time since buying the house years ago. Finds it is not, in fact, a fuse box, but contains rolls and rolls of toilet paper in a cavernous gap in the wall. Corona Virus ravages society, family uses this found toilet paper due to shortages at the supermarket. It seems like regular toilet paper.  There is no indication who put the toilet paper in the fuse box gap, or how long it's been there. 

As the family uses the found TP, they gradually become smarter. How do they/gauge this? In the case of the hapless husband, small tasks around the house that once bedevilled and befuddled him are now simple fixes. He repairs the solid state television, going so far as breaking open the back of the set to access the electronics inside. Husband not only successfully repairs the television, he seamlessly repairs the back of it using his wife's curling iron and strands of her hair, which are the same graphite colour.

Corona Virus Date 0037 days:

Riding stationary bike in basement. Imagining I am pedaling across the ocean on a three foot wide track. Weather service indicates that I have one hour of clear weather before the wind whips up and the ocean swamps my track.

This technique gets my heart rate into that sweet zone.

Don't let me listen to anymore Don Delillo interviews on YouTube.

Corona Virus Date 0038 days:

Scolded eldest son for dismantling one of Don Delillo's wings on the shrine in order to wipe up after bathrooming.

Coronavirus Date 38.5 days:

Wife expelled me from pod, saying: "Get a hold of yourself."

Corona Virus Date 0038.75 days:

Returned to pod. Wife found Corona Virus journal. Objects to be referred to as "Wife" in narrative.

Corona Virus Date 0041 days:

The only benefit of civilization collapsing is that Netflix will be abandoned by its legal counsel and personal security.  I will make the journey to its headquarters in the Himalayas -- part spiritual journey and part customer complaint. "Why does Netflix Austria have so many more offerings than Netflix Canada????  Why so much British content?  I don't care about their Top 10 Conspiracies!!!"

Corona Virus Date 0045 days:

Despair. Cat demolished Don Delillo shrine.

Corona Virus Date 0045.25 days:

Where are our celebrities in this time of crisis? Why have they not mounted webcams in their homes and livestreamed their own self isolation? I would feel less isolated if I could watch such a thing. Also, no word of comfort, yet, from Don Delillo.  I imagine thousands of people gathered outside of his apartment in New York City, waiting, staving off despair.

Corona Virus Date 0045.75 days:

Why can't I find a secret trove of intelligence-generating toilet paper in my house?

Have dreamed for months of connecting my stationary bike to a generator. Tried today. Ruined wife's curling iron in the process. Looking for secret gap in house in which to hide it.

Corona Virus Date 0052 days:

At least I do not have to cut the grass.
_______________________________

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Due to the time distortion wrought by the Corona Virus, all mentions of time in increments of days are in fact increments of hours.

The Bad Future is Here -- I Hate New Technology

Cineplex ticket counter. Computerized kiosks sit in five spaces
where actual human beings used to work.

I am a standard issue North American suburbanite.  Buying things used to be fun.  My first CD player, first DVD player, the tank of a desktop computer in 2004 that I still own, the Apple Mac Classic from 1991, which I still have in my office (and booted up when I turned it on in 2016).

The last laptop I purchased was a run-of-the-mill Windows machine in 2013.  Soon after it arrived, I installed an SSD and the thing just hummed along as I used it to write half a dozen plays, dozens of articles, a few screenplays, worked with Photoshop, and even tried creating a graphic novel.  It was only when I recently had need to edit video on a level beyond Windows Moviemaker, that it was time to expand beyond my old reliable.

After buying a Ford Escape in 2013, I realized the world had passed me by.  With all the attention now placed on "distracted driving" what did Ford put right in the middle of the dashboard?  A video console.  No longer do I have radio buttons that I can feel and know which preprogrammed station will come on.  Now, I must look at the flat screen and press buttons on an interface created by a committee in which not a single soul had usability training.  Yes, the car is equipped with voice command capability.  I do not have time to teach my voice and my worldview to my vehicle.

The Ford Escape will not allow me to close my own trunk door.  I must push a button to have the vehicle do this for me.  The car beeps when I back up.  The beeping grows more urgent and harried if there is something behind me.  There must have been high fives all around among the Ford Motor Company brain trust when that feature was implemented.  Think of all the grateful garbage cans and light posts and fire hydrants.  "Won't anyone think of the fence post?!!!!"  I can almost hear one of the geniuses exclaim with emasculated ebullience.

So, I recently purchased a new Windows laptop.  Reluctantly.  Apprehensively.  Out of necessity.  Still, I hoped there might be a semblance of the old excitement of getting a new machine.  There wasn't.  You see, technology makers are now convinced they know better how I will use their product than I do.  They are wrong, of course.  But like all people with a bad idea, they run like Jim Brown with it.

Within seconds of turning the new machine on and beginning the arduous, needlessly complicated and convoluted set-up process, I was forced to create a Microsoft account.  I have no use for a Microsoft account.  I have tried in the past to create Microsoft accounts after they purchased Skype.  I couldn't figure it out.  It sounds ludicrous, but the manner in which Microsoft insists people create accounts is so confusing that -- in the case of Skype -- I couldn't complete the process.  There was no getting past this step with my new laptop.  That moment soured the entire experience.  I muddled through, gave Microsoft information I didn't want to give to it, and created one of their execrable accounts.

When I had finally hurdled enough hurdles and jumped through enough hoops, my laptop's screen went dark and suddenly a single word appeared in the center of it: "Hi".  I wanted to throw up.

Then the laptop proceeded with its own internal set-up process.  Read: the installation of boatloads of bloatware and bullshit that I would spend the next few days uninstalling.

McAfee Anti-Virus was on the machine.  Really?  I mean, fucking really?  First off, Windows 10 comes with Windows Defender Security Center, which is said to be (in my research) an effective and comprehensive anti-virus program.  So, why put McAfee on, in addition to this?  I can only guess that mega-billion-dollar Microsoft was paid a few more dollars to add this crimp to its customers.

McAfee is the syphillus of software.  I have never had a machine even remotely run well with McAfee on it.  McAfee is not meant for computers.  I don't know what it's meant for.  Maybe it was intended for toaster ovens or certain mid-90s electric sex toys.  Who knows.  Whatever.  McAfee should not be anywhere near a computer, and there it was in the bowels of my new laptop.  It was the first thing I uninstalled.

My new keyboard has LED backlighting.  I love it.

The mouse trackpad buttons are part of the live trackpad, so I am endlessly clicking the wrong buttons, folders, drives and links on my computer.  I'm continusouly, unintentionally enlarging web pages by using the trackpad as I have since 2003 when I purchased my first laptop.

The speakers and/or my headphones don't work with any regularity.  I have to continuously go online to troubleshoot both.  Yesterday, neither worked.  I got the speakers working after watching a few YouTube videos.  Today -- the computer won't recognize that there are headphones plugged in.  My old laptop?  Plug in headphones, music played through the headphones.  Never in my computer-using life have I had to delve so often and so far into arcane settings deep within the machine in order to simply make it work the way it should, out of the box.

UPDATE: Fixed headphone issue after going to the Dell forum about headphones jack not working.  Found the fix, but still pissed that I have to dig so far into this wretched machine to make it work like is should.

There are endless notifications popping up as I try and use my new laptop.  I turn off and deactivate the notifications as quickly as they arise, but it's almost like a full-time job beating back this computer's continuous badgering.

Windows Updates are now whole day events, like Armistice Day and Columbus Day, like the SARS concert.  I succumbed to an update this morning and it took hours to complete.  I just received notice that another update is on deck, sighing loudly and shuffling its feet, like an impatient guy behind me in line at the grocery store.  Fuck you, Windows!  I am a human being!  We will update when I say we update!

The most maddening of these maddening glitches, bugs and pains in the ass is the Lock Screen and Login.  My laptop's set-up process forced me to create a login for my personal laptop.  Which means, when I restart my computer, it comes to a "lock screen" where the boot-up process comes to a complete halt until I login. Meaning, I must wait that much longer to actually use my machine.  My laptop is for home use.  I do not want a login.  There is no reason for it.  I'm willing to assume the responsibility that if my laptop were to fall into the wrong hands, that wrongdoers could access everything on it.  It's my stuff.  I'm willing to take that risk.  But Microsoft will not allow me.  Microsoft thinks it knows better.  It does not know better.

And if you decide to actually telephone Microsoft, their automated phone debacle simply directs you back its useless online resources (which led me to call, in the first place).  The Circle of Microsoft!

Somewhere in the early 2000s, technology bounced off the wall and has become increasingly less useful, less user-friendly.  The makers of technology think their customers are idiots who need the jaunty greeting of "Hi" from their new laptop as bloatware and bullshitware are installed behind the scenes.

The only consolation is that Built-in Obsolescence, shitty workmanship and the general engineering of the early demise of products, just as their warranties expire...

Wait.  There is no consolation.

That brief window where new technology was actually interesting and exciting is gone -- just like the ticket sellers at the cineplex.  Now, it seems, Rube Goldberg has gotten a hold of applets and dynamic link libraries.

April 12 Pilgrimage - J.T. Hurley's Anniversary

The J.T. Hurley Chronicles

• Counting to Infinity
• Home Movie Time Travel
• Lost in the Tall Grass
• April 12 Pilgrimage - J.T. Hurley's Anniversary

---

St. William Cemetery

There is a temptation to canonize and rhapsodize about the dead.  Thirty-nine years ago, my friend, J.T. Hurley, died: April 12, 1979, the Thursday before Easter weekend.  At the time, my little brother and I were looking forward to going to J.T.'s on Easter Sunday for an Easter egg hunt.  Then came the phone call for my mother from Metropolitan Hospital.  It was J.T.'s mother.  She was frantic, but she was clear -- J.T. was dead.  He was nine years old.

I was seven years old at that time, and remember playing in my back yard when my father called my brother and I into the house.  An ice storm, days before, caused a neighbor's tree to collapse across a couple of yards -- the topmost tangled part of the tree (the part we could never climb to when it stood straight) rested in our yard and my brother and I were exploring it when my father called us.

Dad led us into the living room and sat on the floor with us, which was unusual.  His face was in turmoil, but at seven, I had no way of reading it.  Adults were strange creatures to me, then, who confused and bewildered me on an hour-to-hour basis.

When Dad said, "J.T. had an accident," I remember smiling inward, excitedly preparing to hear about the latest cool cast J.T. would be wearing on Easter Sunday.  Months before, he had broken his leg, and I remember examining his plaster cast with rapt fascination, running a finger over the inscriptions and drawings left in multi-colored pen by his friends.  Maybe it was his arm, this time, or maybe he had a black eye.  Or, a bandage wrapped around his head like those guys in TV shows who had amnesia.

Then my father said, "J.T. has gone to Jesus."  It took nothing more for me to understand that something terrible and irrevocable had happened.

The most galling, scalding detail of J.T.'s death was that he died while climbing through a window into his house.  It was the one day he was allowed to go home by himself -- his regular after school babysitter was out of town for Easter weekend.  After a week of concerted lobbying to be allowed to go home by himself just this one time, J.T.'s mother relented.  Except, J.T. forgot to ask for the house key, or his mother forgot to give it to him.  When he got home, he was locked out.

J.T. was a natural athlete, graceful and agile.  He could climb anything.  Climbing through a window into his house -- which was all of five feet off the ground -- was like a starting basketball player shooting a balled-up piece of paper into a garbage pail.  Except, the window fell as J.T. climbed through.  It seems he didn't raise the window high enough for the clasp at the top to catch and hold.  It should have just clunked him on the head when it fell, leaving nothing more than a goose egg.  If it had to fall, it should have fallen on his back.  But on April 12, 1979, the window came down on the back of his neck, pinning him in place, his feet bare, excruciating inches from the ground.

So, it's 39 years later, and though I have thought of J.T. many times during the intervening years, visiting his mother numerous times at their house, this anniversary has landed on me like an anvil.  The 2018 calendar aligns with the 1979 calendar.  Not perfectly.  Easter was a couple of weeks ago, but April 12 is a Thursday, once again.  And here I find myself on a self-guided pilgrimage.

My first stop is J.T.'s grave.  It is lunch time and, sure enough, the sounds of the students in the St. William school yard, nearby, are completely audible here.

I never get used to seeing J.T.'s grave marker.  There obviously has been some kind of mistake, and the more I visit, the more I'll draw attention to this flaw and something in the Time/Space Continuum will jostle itself and the whole tragic accident that claimed J.T.'s life will be undone.  The utter ridiculousness of such a thought is apparent to me everywhere, except when I stand at J.T.'s grave.

One afternoon, a few weeks ago, while visiting, I strolled around to see who his "neighbors" were.  I was taken aback to find the graves of two other boys -- in a cluster of Robitaille family tombstones -- who had lived 1966 - 1976 and 1968 - 1978, respectively.  I am no demographer, but I marveled at the slim odds of three boys, buried within 25 feet of each other, who had all died at the same young age outside a time of plague or pestilence.

Following an unspecified length of time, graveside, I drive eight minutes to J.T.'s house -- though, it is no longer his house.  After his mother's death in December, a new owner took possession (though, the house remains empty), so I am technically trespassing as I walk around the property, taking pictures.

I start at the open carport where I had watched J.T. perform one of his "stunts" -- crashing his bicycle into a pile of boxes, garbage cans, a hockey net and other, assorted garage debris.  He had choreographed it to look and sound as dangerous as possible.  It had worked.  My brother and I, standing at a safe distance wondered, briefly, if he'd broken his neck, only to see J.T. jump to his feet without a scratch.  After his death, the carport emptied of anything that looked fun.  All that was left were garbage pails, an ancient extension ladder, various unused flower pots.  The only thing, possibly, from J.T.'s era is a dirty, old plastic bin that used to be situated at the top of the back stairs -- a quarter-filled with water -- for us to swish our sandy feet before going into the house.

I pause at the small front porch.  Next to it is a winter-ravaged plant of some variety I can't readily identify.  My last visit here with Aunt June, J.T.'s mom, last September, she offhandedly pointed to the plant (flourishing at the time), saying, "I planted that right after J.T. died.  It's doing well!"  And it was, and it probably will, again.

I look through the narrows windows on either side of the front door.  There are no surprises inside the house.  It is vacant; door of the fridge hanging open in the kitchen, sunlight streaming through the windows.

Halloween 1970s

Then, around to the lakeside of the house.  Long, long ago, Aunt June had the windows replaced, so the one that had claimed J.T. is long gone.  My mother said that people would ask Aunt June how she could stay in the house after what had happened.  It's a reasonable question, but to my mind, highly unreasonable to ask of a woman who lost her son in that house.  I go around and look at the windows.  I turn and look at the beach, which has receded greatly since I visited as a kid.  The day is sunny and the winter chill that has stubbornly hung on has released its hold -- for this afternoon, at least.  I go to the water and let a wave run up onto my shoes.  My parents have Super 8 footage, somewhere, of me sitting on this shore as a baby, slapping my hands down on each small, lapping wave, attempting to catch them.

I take pictures with my phone, and look into windows. Yes, I am looking for ghosts.  I find none.  All the furniture is gone. J.T.'s room has been devoid of his belongings for decades.  On visits to Aunt June's, those first few times after J.T. died, my brother and I would approach the open door of his bedroom, never entering, and gaze at his stuff: sports pendants, a granite chess board, books, toys, his old bedspread on the bed.  Far sooner than I was ready, the room emptied of J.T.'s belongings. No one could begrudge Aunt June for doing whatever she needed to do to make life livable in his absence.  As it turned out, far from simply donating all of J.T.'s possessions to Goodwill, Aunt June allowed his friends to come over and pick out mementos.  Of everything J.T. had owned, Aunt June held back his favorite jean jacket, an odd stuffed monkey with which he slept as a young child and his baseball glove.  All of which I now have.

Hoping to indulge my over-developed sense of nostalgia with this visit, I'm only reminded of Thomas Wolfe once wrote: "You can't go home again."

As I take a few final photos at the front of the property, a curious neighbor approaches and asks what I am doing.  I explain my relationship to Aunt June and that it's J.T.'s anniversary; that he was once my friend.  I am relieved to see the suspicion disappear from the neighbor's gaze.  He remembers Aunt June fondly, though he never knew J.T..  He marvels that 39 years have passed since J.T.'s passing.  "As we got to know, June," the neighbor says, "she would talk about him from time to time..."  The thought drifts away.  He goes back to his yard work.  I go to my car.

And drive to Metropolitan Hospital.

* * *

We should honor how people lived, not dwell on the circumstances of their deaths.  My memories of J.T. are filled with happiness and fun.  There is a temptation to canonize and rhapsodize about the dead.  Suffice it to say that J.T. Hurley was wall-to-wall fun.

As a middle-aged father of two boys, my youthful delusions of invincibility are long in the past, shed like the jeans that no longer fit me.  My mind dwells on the circumstances of J.T.'s death.  He died alone, the silence of his childhood home surrounding him in mute helplessness.  The waves of Lake St. Clair lapping against the shore with metronome regularity, utterly indifferent.

According to Hourly Data Weather Report for April 12, 1979 it was a cloudy, hazy day in the area with a high temperature of 13 degrees Celsius (55.4 Fahrenheit).  Jacket weather.  There is every chance that J.T. was wearing his favorite jean jacket that day, which his mother gave to me last September.

In his book Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, author David Eagleman says, "There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time." 

Mr. Eagleman offers some comfort that I can, at least, save J.T. Hurley from one death.

The image that keeps returning to me centers on the first day back to school following Easter 1979 -- the day after J.T.'s burial.

J.T.'s final resting place is in St. William cemetery, which was next to St. William Church (now defunct), which was right next to St. William elementary school, where he was a fourth grade student.  The first time I visited J.T.'s grave, I was amazed to see that the school was visible from the cemetery and wondered if the sounds of kids playing in the school yard were audible there.

Students in the St. William school yard beyond the cemetery.

I imagine that first day back, Tuesday, April 17, 1979, the students of fourth grade filing into their classroom following the morning bell, taking their seats, a somber silence hanging over them.  And when finally the last student was seated, there was that one, lone, empty desk among them.

J.T.'s desk.

The morning announcements would have mentioned his death, prayers asked for.  Many of his classmates, no doubt, arrived that morning already knowing of the accident.  How sad and surreal it must have been to know that J.T. was gone, but nearby, that he lay within a grave that was five minutes' walking distance from where he sat through Math and Geography lessons.  How circumstance had forced the trade of a student desk for a grave, a classroom for a coffin.  That, on the previous Thursday, he was among them, laughing, running in the school yard, taking notebooks out of his desk, shoving them back into his desk, dropping pencils, chewing on erasers, talking, joking, listening, drawing.

On that dismal Tuesday, the books in his desk, and the lessons they contained, had been exploded into irrelevance by his death.  All of J.T.'s school things sat stuffed in that desk and the task of emptying it lay ahead.  The desk must have been like a bomb crater in the room.  I think of the student sitting behind J.T.'s desk, with that empty, gaping space before them the rest of the day, the rest of the week, the rest of the school year.  Or, the student sitting in front of J.T.'s desk.  Did they ever experience a superstitious tingling on the back of their neck?  J.T. would mean no one any harm.  He wouldn't haunt or frighten anyone.  Our own minds do that job.

Or, did the teacher reconfigure the seating arrangement and have J.T.'s desk removed?  Did a new student arrive in the weeks following, to occupy the desk with no knowledge as to why it was empty?  Kids being kids, there is no question someone would have stepped up to inform the new student.  Not necessarily with malice, but with a kid's guileless desire to inform.

Or, had the empty desk simply remained, as is -- sadder and starker than any grave marker could be.

So, today is April 12.  It is my eldest son's birthday.  He was born in the hospital where J.T. had been taken.  Although today is J.T.'s anniversary, it is first and foremost, to me, my son's birthday.  J.T. would have no objection to that.  Today, however, I am allowing myself to split it.  This is the first anniversary on which I am actually aware of the date J.T. died.  For 38 years, I only knew that he died on Holy Thursday, a moving target date that changed from year to year.  Then came the day I finally located J.T.'s grave.  The date engraved on it was suddenly engraved in me.

As I write this, it's 4:03 p.m.. It is hard to say with any accuracy, but J.T. would have arrived at his home sometime around now.  He would have found the front door locked and realized he didn't have the key.  There is a part of my mind that is certain if I only pore over the details of J.T.'s final moments, some detail can be found, some glitch in the matrix that would allow me to reverse engineer the accident and save him.  Impossible, of course, but part of me won't give up.

The rest of me, however, knows the ending to the story: J.T. found an unlatched window, raised it and attempted to climb into the house.  The window fell on him, pinning him, causing him to suffocate.  At some point later, J.T.'s mother realized she hadn't given him the house key.  She called a neighbor, asking if the neighbor could check on J.T. and see if he was wandering around the house, or sitting on the front steps.  The neighbor found J.T., got him down from the window and attempted CPR.  An ambulance was called.  J.T. resided in Puce, Ontario, on Lake St. Clair, a 40-minute drive from Metropolitan Hospital.  The ambulance arrived and took him to Met.  The EMS tech worked on J.T. during the frantic drive, fishing an intubation tube down his throat and attempting to get him breathing again.  Finally, J.T. was rushed into the ER, but it was apparent to all who observed him -- he was no longer alive.  The ER doctor pronounced him dead at 5:55 p.m.  His mother arrived.  My mother was called.  As they waited for J.T.'s father to arrive, Aunt June came and went from the examination room where J.T. lay with the intubation tube protruding uselessly from his open mouth.

Evening of April 12...

J.T. Hurley, March 1979.

My friend is gone, and the day of his anniversary is nearly done.  I'm sure there are those who would accuse me of not allowing J.T. to rest in peace.  Nobody questions my thoughts and motives more than I do.  What do I hope to find?  What do I hope to resolve? 

When I push to divine my motives, a phrase recurs in my mind: "He was us."  

One summer day when I was two or three years old, I was outside with my parents, hunting for bugs in the grass as they did yard work.  It was a Saturday and it was sunny and at some point a sudden impulse took hold of me and I ran into the street.  At the same moment, a car approached.  There was a great shriek of tires, which seemed to wrench the flow of time right off its rails. The air was sucked out of the world.  In that sliver of a moment, I looked at the car ten feet away from me -- I stood eye-level with the wide, round headlights -- and saw the startled expression on the face of the driver; he was still bobbing back and forth from the sudden stop.  He was in his twenties with floppy blond hair.  A girl with long hair parted in the middle sat in the passenger seat.  The look on the guy's face was a mixture of terror and confusion.

Then, air blasted back into the world, I took a breath, the sounds of the neighborhood reasserted themselves, and a pair of hands wrapped around my torso.  I was lifted off the ground and I didn't return to solid footing until my father set me down in my bedroom and shut the door.

Had one or two actions occurred differently that day -- had the floppy blond-haired guy left the house a few seconds later or my sudden inspiration to run into the road come a second later -- it might well be J.T. Hurley writing a blog post about his three year old friend who never made it to school, never lived to see Star Wars, or to write his name.

He was us.

And it would be my time-faded photograph on the wall, the memory of my voice and laugh and running footsteps that would haunt and harangue my parents the rest of their lives.  I would have been little more than a ghost to my younger brother.  But the world worked as it should have that day: the car stopped in time, I spent the afternoon in my bedroom, my parents thought twice about letting me so close to the road, again.  And life went on.

Lost in the Tall Grass

 The J.T. Hurley Chronicles

• Counting to Infinity
• Home Movie Time Travel
• Lost in the Tall Grass
• April 12 Pilgrimage - J.T. Hurley's Anniversary

---

Probably the last photograph taken of J.T. Hurley, 
processed in March 1979, weeks before his death.

Whether it's Marilyn Monroe, Lenny Bruce, Jim Morrison, Anne Sexton or David Foster Wallace, I am fascinated reading about the final days of people's lives.

One of the first biographies I read was 'Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky: The Life of Jimi Hendrix by David Henderson. As I neared its inevitable conclusion, I pored over the increasingly sketchy accounts of Hendrix's final days and hours with an archaeologist's eye, directed by a strange sense that if his dwindling moments were given enough attention, Hendrix's death could be reverse-engineered, and possibly averted.  Ridiculous, of course, but there is a part of me that still doesn't know that, or at least, refuses to acknowledge it.

And so, revisiting the story of my childhood friend, J.T. Hurley's sudden and tragic death, I am doing it all again, visiting the main branch of the library, scanning through microfiche of our local newspaper, The Windsor Star, searching for the Easter weekend 1979 edition.  I found a grainy image of his obituary and a short article describing the circumstances of his death with all the heart of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

J.T.'s accident occurred on the one day his mother allowed him to go home by himself after school.  His usual after-school babysitter was out of town for Easter weekend.  As it happened, J.T. forgot to get the house key from his mother, and was locked out when he arrived home.  Never one to sit still, he went around the beachside of his home on Lake St. Clair and attempted to climb in through an unlocked window.  He was an agile, athletic boy for whom climbing was easy. 

Except it wasn't.  The window fell as he pulled himself through.  It's maddening to consider how easily it could have just thumped him on the head, leaving him with little more than a goose egg, or falling across his back, leaving him to wriggle his way in, possibly breaking the window with his heels as he swung his legs to propel himself forward... later suffering the harmless ire of his mother.  But the window came down upon the back of his neck.  The window frame was five feet off the ground.  J.T. was four feet, six inches tall. 

The details are as maddening as they are heartbreaking.

J.T. Hurley (left), Tim St. Amand (seated, center),
Matt St. Amand (right)

My mother shared her recollections of the event with me.  She was very close with J.T.'s mom -- whom my brother and I grew up calling "Aunt June" -- and she was the first person Aunt June called from the hospital.  My mother went and recently described to me seeing J.T. lying upon the examination table in the Emergency Room: A boy we were to see on Easter Sunday, whose diapers my mother had changed when he was a baby, aged nine at the time of his death, at the outer edge of adolescence, four and a half feet tall, a "big guy" to me and my brother.  All vital signs lost. 

My mother described how Aunt June, distraught and steadily descending into an inescapable circle of Hell, came and went from the examining room where J.T. lay.  She was waiting for her ex-husband, Michael Hurley, who had driven in from Sarnia to see J.T. on Friday and Saturday. Time passed.  He did not arrive.  According to the doctors, J.T. was probably gone before he was placed in the ambulance at his house.  EMS made every possible effort to bring him back.  As impossible as it still seems, nearly 39 years later, nothing worked.  He had died.

And here is where reality and memory disrupt the even flow of a story that smoothed over in fiction.  All the while Aunt June came and went from the ER examining room where J.T. lay, J.T.'s father, waited for her at her house.  He had arrived some time after the ambulance had left.  Police officers lingered, making notes on the scene, but for some reason said nothing to J.T.'s father about the severity of the accident.  It doesn't make sense now, but apparently, that's what happened.  They knew J.T. had died, but nobody could utter the words outloud.  All they said was that J.T. had an accident, giving no indication as to its seriousness.  In all likelihood, J.T.'s dad thought it was another fall from a tree, or some such accident, and that he'd just wait for his ex-wife to bring J.T. home.

Except, she didn't.

Finally, after literally hours had passed, a neighbor had mercy and told J.T.'s father that his son was at Metropolitan hospital in Windsor and that he should probably go there, too.  Michael Hurley arrived at Met Hospital ER, impatient from waiting, utterly unaware -- until he saw Aunt June and proceeded to freefall like a doomed airliner from the stratosphere of feeling irked and put-out at being kept waiting, to hearing his only child was no longer alive.

At some point, a woman who worked with Aunt June at the Children's Rehabilitation Centre, heard the news and stepped in and took over as needed.  My mother couldn't remember the woman's name, only that she was British.  She was not an especially close friend of Aunt June's, but she knew what to do.  She got Aunt June home, stayed with her, and set down to the business of arranging a funeral that had come decades before its rightful time.

And so the terrible weekend played itself out with a visitation at Windsor Chapel across the street from Met Hospital.  The burial on Easter Monday.  And then school on Tuesday.  I returned to school that day and I am sure most, if not all, of J.T.'s classmates went to school on Tuesday.  I can't help thinking of the newly empty desk in their classroom, sitting their like a bomb crater, containing half-filled notebooks of spelling exercises and math problems, geography maps as yet unmarked or looked at, all of which had dissolved into irrelevancy over the weekend.  The sharpened pencils, the used eraser, the smudged wooden ruler on the ledge just inside the desk -- never to be touched by J.T. again.

Next door to the school was the church where J.T.'s burial service was held.  Beyond the church parking lot was the cemetery where J.T. now lay buried.  The sounds of the school yard could be heard in the cemetery.

For weeks afterward, Aunt June stayed at our house.  My brother and I shared a bedroom.  We began each night in our own beds, but sometime in the middle of the night, I would roll over and find him next to me in my bed.  I remember looking up and seeing the sleeping form of Aunt June in my brother's bed.

And at some point, she returned home and went back to work.  We all tried to get back to normal, but there was no normal with such a gaping crater in the center of our lives. 

A mutual friend recently said to me, pondering J.T.'s death: "Can you imagine the pain?"

I could not.  She could not.  No one can, yet it exists and beyond all comprehension, it appears -- to one degree or another -- to be endurable.

Reverse side of final photo of J.T. Hurley.

When Aunt June died on December 8, 2017, her niece left me some photos of J.T. that Aunt June had close to her at the end.  One of them shows him lying in the middle of his living room floor with a boy whom I do not know.  They are playing with toy cars. 

Across the back of the photo, in faded red script "MAR 1979" was stamped several times by the company that developed the photo.  J.T. died April 12, 1979.  As I examine what must have been the final photograph of him, and look at the microfiche scans from the April 14, 1979 Windsor Star, I somehow feel as though poring over J.T.'s final days, hours, minutes, I might find a glitch in the Matrix, a line of incorrect code, which, when corrected will bring him back.

After one of my countless Internet searches for April 1979, a photo from The Windsor Star came up -- a picture of a crucifix in St. Anne's cemetery, dated April 12, 1979.  J.T. was, in all probability, at school the moment the picture was taken.  I pore over the image and the date in the caption wondering if there is no possible way to transport to that place, to that moment, and to find my way to St. William elementary school in Emeryville...  It's all too ridiculous.  Of course I cannot.  Although I understand the sentiment, I don't understand the futile mental exercise of putting myself through that.

When a story ends far too soon in real life, it's difficult to end it in the retelling.  Whenever I visit J.T. Hurley's grave, I ask myself an uncomfortable question: Am I mourning his passing or am I mourning the passing of my own childhood and youth?  The easy answer is to say "a little of both", but I'm not yet decided.  J.T. is not the only friend I had as a kid.  In fact, he is not the only one whose life came to a premature end.  This is about the time someone would accuse me -- not for the first time -- of "thinking too much".  I don't believe there is such a thing, but at times I do feel like I'm working on an algebra problem that has taken me right off the page, across my desk and into the air.

And midair is where I have to leave this story.  I will not stop thinking about J.T. Hurley, nor will I stop visiting his grave.  After the spring, Aunt June's remains are interred there.  The house of memory at 784 Old Tecumseh Road now belongs to someone else.

I thought I saw an answer to it all in the 1978 movie, Superman, starring Christopher Reeves, when Lois Lane appears to die near the end.  After finding her, a grief-stricken Superman flies out of the earth's atmosphere and begins flying around the world against its spin on its axis.  After a few dozen orbits, the world actually begins to turn backward.  Superman eases it back just enough so that the accident that claims Lois Lane's life doesn't have a chance to occur.  She's OK and impatient to be waiting at the side of the road with car trouble.  If only.