Tao

Below the Earth – Above the Sun: To Whom it may Concern

06-FridayThe13-2025:

Ok… laundry day in Waldorf, Maryland. A mere 16 miles from DC-Metro’s “Green Line” to the Federal Triangle. Last weekend, i spent 45k steps perusing the triangle, including a walkabout in the Jefferson Library and the Smithsonian “Portrait Studio.” As well, it just so happened to be Pride Fest and that’s the reason i got so many steps. I had to walk AROUND the fenced-in festival area until such time as they accepted revelers. When they started letting people in, they wouldn’t allow my freakin’ backpack, so i had to ditch it for the Sunday visit. 

Summer Cool-Down Shelter
Navy Memorial
Pride Day on the Mall
Hoover FBI Building
Center of the Whirlpool
National Archives
Congressional Reading Room
WTH is This?
Archives Metro Station
War Cabinet
Capital Hill

Anyway… this is No Kings weekend, the 250th year anniversary of the Continental Army, and (more importantly) Donald Trump’s birthday. So, in honor of all that (mostly the naked emperor’s birthday), there will be a festive military parade, as if we had something to prove to our nation’s enemies. By the way, what enemies really need to be intimidated?? The DOMESTIC enemy?? That’s right, President Ass-hat has been demonizing his political opposition for nearly a decade, declaring them the “enemy of the people.” He behaves as if he REALLY wants a Civil War redo. He even re-renamed all of those recently renamed Southern military bases after Confederate Generals.

I would say, “can you believe it?” But we’re WAY past that, we can believe it. It’s no longer horrifying, and i fear a climate of having the US executive branch at odds with half the population they are SUPPOSED to be serving is getting normalized. Seriously, what does he think? That he can politically cleanse the nation till only MAGAs remain

Bleep THAT!!

How this shakes out beyond the political black hole’s event horizon is anyone’s guess. Mine is as good as any, so here are a few plausible scenarios:

  • ONE: Investigators chasing the possibility that Elon and his hacker buccaneers rigged the 2024 election, find a smoking gun that proves Delicate Donny’s posturing about a stolen 2020 Election was merely foreshadowing for everything 2024 and after. Between congressional gerrymandering, the stacking of the courts by McConnel, and Elon’s hacker squad actively changing ballots, we’ll find Harris actually won that election, and the house of cards Delicate Donny built comes crashing down in a whispering whimper.
  • TWO: The rightward shift of several key demographics was actually a thing. Donny holds on to his Trifecta, and there’s no more democracy. Curtis Yarvin’s wettest of dreams come true, Steve Bannon finally pops like the malignant cyst he is, Stephen Miller laps up the blood, and the upside down is permanently installed until such time as a stout resistance infiltrates the military and stages another coup, setting in motion a constant cycle of banana republic-esque military coup after military coup.
  • THREE: The mid-term turnout is so overwhelmingly blue that no amount of cheating can stand, and MAGA’s demise is somewhat delayed.
  • FOUR: California, Washington, Oregon, and the North Eastern New England states secede from the MAGA disunion, join forces with Canada setting off a fierce border war with which Idaho, Montana, and North Dakota desperately lobby Texas, Louisiana, Arizona, and Florida for assistance. A futile effort in the end as Mexico takes advantage of the chaos keeping the southern states too busy to be of much help on the Northern Front.

Yikes…!!

I ask my MAGA friends and neighbors… “is this REALLY what you want? Do you HATE gays, atheists, independent-minded women, brown and trans people so much that you’ll gladly push this formerly respected world power into a zero-sum contest over cultural trivialities?” Seriously, i NEVER got mad at anyone wishing me “Merry Christmas.” In fact, i am prone to throw that greeting around preemptively as a way to bring down the temperature in my ruby red neighborhoods.

As well, i have been propositioned by gay men for what reasons i cannot fathom other than you CAN’T JUDGE a BOOK by the COVER (duh)! Did i get angry?? Of course not. It’s flattering. In one case, i was in a typical top-40 dance band playing a ski-resort gig. Flaming youth! Apparently, i was broadcasting pheromones… it was a compliment. I politely thanked the bar patron for the compliment and let him know i was playing on the hetero team, “straight as an arrow.” He turned his attention elsewhere and that’s that… not rocket science.

At another extreme… in my elementary school days, i was on fire for Jesus and ready for a lifetime of evangelism and missionary wanderings. But something happened as my frontal lobes started developing expanding my worldview past the tip of my nose. I came to understand that all devoted religious followers believe theirs is the best or only path to the divine. Mine also happened to include doctrines about those who do NOT believe, that they would be in for eternal agony if they didn’t, “see the light.” This i simply could not square with what i learned about Jesus’ example, and so i began a spiritual search that ended up somewhere around Tao, Buddhism, QuantumMysteriousness.

Do i now hate those who cling to their exclusionary creeds?? NO… i have Muslim friends, Mennonite friends, Baptist friends, Hindu friends, Catholic friends, Cherokee friends, etc. etc. I tend to regard religion with the same discretion as sexuality, in private, among friendly interlocutors. 

Regarding trans people: Do those hopelessly bigoted troglodytes actually believe a person would CHOOSE social ostracization, a lifetime of being regarded as a freak? Anyone who believes a human being (social animals to the core) would CHOOSE exile probably need professional help. I wonder if they’ve ever tried engaging empathetic thought experiments, like walking in the metaphorical shoes of a trans person found in any community. Not in your back yard, you say? Maybe think in terms of bell curves. The numbers may be miniscule but each bell has a tail at the extremes; least and most likely. Can you put yourself in the shoes of the trans person you’ve encountered personally? Did you choose to be that way? Why? Think it through and get back to me won’t you? 

Dear MAGA…
Why can’t you be more like Jesus?
Please explain as if speaking to Kindergartners.

If you don’t want to have this discussion in public, please DM me, i will keep your confidence… you have my word.

FINALLY… i’m getting this out in the open because there have been speculations about what may happen to protesters in DC tomorrow. If we have another Kent State or Tiananmen Square and i don’t make it out, i want my MAGA friends to ponder the above questions for my sake. Lastly, i beg you… don’t drag my children into a zero-sum violence choice… Please Please Please??

Cheers and gratitude… Rohlfie

Hot Springs or Busk: Chapter II (mongrel of the rueful countenance)

And so… it’s probably good to get some background out of the way. And whether this public-facing journal features opinion, commentary, straight bald facts, mongrel music, or utterly inexplicable gonzo fiction, it’s important readers/listeners have access to the creator’s ethnic, cultural, socio-economic background, political leanings, as well as religious and/or gender identification. These things should be clear so that, rather than walking on rhetorical eggshells as is the custom these days, we can let our freak-flags fly… let these bare-metal stories/songs live and breathe as we see them. Unbounded by the illusion of disinterested objectivity, let’s pursue what Werner Herzog calls… “Ecstatic Truths.”

And since we’re not in cahoots with a genealogist, nor invested in 23andMe, this particular ancestry reaches back only so far as the late 19th century. It’s a shallow oral history scantly passed down by depression-era grand and great-grandparents. That said, it is an amusing clash of melting pot misfits: Jerrys (Deutsch), Harps (Gaelic), and Brits (English) all mashed together in Uncle Sam’s ethnic stew. Picture this, America: pre-WWI, a land teeming with more immigrant groups than a clown car at a rodeo. Among them, three distinct flavors: Stoic Jerrys, Guinness-swilling Harps, and stiff-upper-lip Brits. Now, imagine them crammed into the stew, a bubbling cauldron promising assimilation but spewing out this mongrel of rueful countenance… the alter-ego, Ronnie Hays.

Anyway, in the pre-war surge, a couple German immigrants (bless their lederhosey hearts) arrived in Pittsburg Kansas having never met in their native city, Bremen Germany. With the efficiency of healthy Volkswagen Beetles, this intrepid couple found a way to thrive in the desolate Kansas prairie. They labored, they brewed, they ooom pa’d with metronome precision. Their industriousness and tireless work-ethic hummed with the ineffable rhythm of Mother Nature’s shifting seasons. A stark contrast with the life and times of one of their sons (we’ll call him “Cool” Carl). Cool Carl moved West, to the gold mines of front-range Colorado, and once these wild-west gold-rush oats were sewn he settled in, built a brick house in the North Denver suburbs and raised a no-nonsense industrial beat-cop turned public works supervisor (call him Grumpalumpagus). This is where the Jerry genes crashed into the U.K. genes. Mr. Grumpalumpagus met and married a U.K. girl from Russell Kansas (we’ll call her Sassy SalGal), and the rest is female emancipation, generation gap, moonshots, hippies, rednecks, Indian uprisings, Viet Nam, race riots, billy clubs, police crackdowns, irreconcilable-differences, and divorce… history.

Add to the 1960s baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet culture-crisis, a fundamental communication gap between Grumpalumpagus (a Jerry husband) and Sassy SalGal (a U.K. wife) distracted by waves of female emancipation facilitated by the various social safety nets, contraception, and pop-intellectual peer-pressure and you get a three-ring circus of misinterpretations. The Jerry cop’s guttural proclamations insisting women be house servants sent shivers down Sassy SalGal’s back. She might have mistook his alpha pronouncements for some sort of desperate war-of-the-sexes battle cry. The Brit influence in her uttering lyrical oaths under mumbling breath. The playful, but scrappy Harp in her issuing caustic digs like leprechauns on a whiskey rampage. Of course her U.K. sense of sarcastic wit met with bewildered frowns from the Jerry cop, and also alarmed her British father whose clipped pronouncements, delivered as if they were coming from the Queen herself, failed to persuade SalGal back into her pre-emancipation place.

Now… what about our intrepid storyteller and his all-singing-dancing crap-of-the-world alter-ego… this “Yuppytown Refugee?” Well… amid the slapstick of the 1960s and 1970s, something remarkable happened. The Jerry work ethic rubbed off on the Harp’s tendency toward mournful poetry, inspiring our hero to trade brawling for bucking deadlines. The Harp’s infectious penchant for music and storytelling livened up the all-work-no-play grindstone, turning out a somewhat disciplined rueful troubadour with British influence, ever pragmatic, looking for economic potential in this mongrel stew.

Of course, it’s not all work-hard-play-hard and beer. Inner-tensions flare, prejudices fester, and the occasional existential brawl serves as a reminder of the differences that still bubble beneath the surface. But slowly, surely, a new identity emerges, a uniquely American blend of Bratwurst, Guinness, and Monty Python Flying Loopcircus.

Of course…. ch ch ch changes… modern inclusive culture has temporarily ushered him to the sidelines in order to make room for the rainbow character of this remarkable nation. The thing is, none of the normal trappings of acquisitive individualism matters to our mongrel of rueful countenance. The temporary disenfranchisement of white male energy doesn’t bother him at all. And if he can enjoy a few more healthy years for writing, playing, and singing his stories, even if no one is listening, he’s in his element… in need of nothing more.

So, the next time you raise a glass to the American Dream, remember the loopy cultural car crashes somehow managing to forge new soul from fragments of European heritage. It’s not always pretty, it’s not always peaceful, but it has been, and hopefully is still… entertaining.

To list MEMEtic influences would be too long for this posting, but here are a few examples: Kurt Vonnegut‘s irrepressible humor in the face of tragedy, Hunter S. Thompson‘s incisive musical prose, Tom Wolfe‘s wiz-popping use of vivid metaphor, or the entire tower of song mentioned by Leonard Cohen. It’s all part of this grand, messy, beautiful American experiment.

Cheers… Rohlfie

PS: That’s some gene/meme-pool stuff… didn’t get around to socio-economic class, politics, religion, or gender identity. Stay tuned… we’ll get to those things in future postings.