Dennis Myers

I’m Not There: observations from the inaugurations

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‘Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood / When blackness was a virtue…

I didn’t wake at 6am to face the winter’s dim dawn. I would leave the capital and its grand tradition of peaceful power to the deep chill of fridged temperatures and unforgiving winds. I pulled the bed covers higher and rolled over onto my left side.

Eight years ago I threaded my camera through the Virginia Avenue crowds to enter the mall and climb that shining monument on the hill. A crowd of hundreds (no more) ringed the giant vision. They clapped as their leader took an oath in light hard rain.

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Larry David, I Want My Life Back

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An open letter

I know fame.

I’ve experienced fame.

And I now know the price of fame.

All without being famous.

Larry David, I want my life back.

I notice the illusion starts with the sideways glance, followed by a series of yes/no/can’t/could/not sure/but hey that leads to the soft opening: “Has anyone ever told you that you look like Larry David?” Ever?  My new friend, you are the third person today.

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Quarantine Me: I’m Old

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The road to Lisburn serpentines through rolling Pennsylvanian farm land.  At its near start, it anchors a capital bedroom community etched out of GI Bill housing built after the war, what a war.  At its far end, there isn’t much but a firehouse serving charity bbq chicken in the summer and a rope swing stretching out over the Yellow Breeches, also best in summer.  Green grasses bathed in the smell of clipped chlorophyll, young corn just breaking to sunlight, dips that drive you into the earth and then just as quickly rise up to give you the illusion of flight: to travel Lisburn Road is to experience freedom, the soul-freeing kind of freedom, where you scream in your head that it’s great to be alive. And you’re right.

Or, at least it used to be that way.

The famous line is that you can’t go home again.  That’s a lie, of course.  You can always get there if you have Waze or Google Maps.  If you look on one of those aps, Lisburn in all its glorious summer glow still lives.  It’s just that Lisburn Road is gone:  someone killed it with a rotary in the road’s rhythm.

Actually, two rotaries, one right after the other.

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2024: The Body Politic on Steroids

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[01-01-2024] In light of the upcoming election year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved class-wide labeling changes for all prescription testosterone products, adding a new Warning and updating the Abuse and Dependence section to include new safety information from published literature and case reports regarding the risks associated with abuse and dependence of testosterone and other AAS.

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The Revenging Angels of Our Nature

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I have difficulties with Sherman, Wm. Tecumseh Sherman. Despite his clear-sighted warnings that a war with the Northern states would be “folly, madness, a crime against civilization!” Despite his soft affinities for southern culture, having spent time in Charleston, the cradle of rebellion, it was Sherman who materialized his prophecy that the south would be “drenched in blood.” His march from Atlanta to the sea, brought the Civil War’s terrors to the home front, a wide swath of pillage and fire, a wild escapade intended to blind the ante bellum and “make Georgia howl.”

Perhaps Arthur Harris — Sir Arthur Harris, 1st Baronet — was a more successful angel of the apocalypse.  As the architect of Britian’s bombing campaign of German cities, Harris sought a righteous revenge against the aggression, actually the existence, of the Nazi regime.  “They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.”

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My Brother as Hunger Artist

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Perhaps mad laughter, absurd laughter breaks the indulgence in suffering. 

“These cookies?” There were a dozen Oreos and an equal amount of Lorna Doones scattered on the hospital tray. “Are you going to eat these?”  Atop the cookies was a meal ticket stamped with a single word:  bereavement. The floor nurse hovered, shifting her weight leg to leg, waiting on my response. “Do you mind if I take a few?” 

It was against my better judgement to give up what little, in my brother’s dying hours, that this hospital had chosen to give back to us.  The numbers mattered here. Over the previous two days, although Don was clearly dying—evident to the staff, his family, and most importantly himself—the hospital refused more than two visitors in the private room at a time.  Two would come down and two more could go up.  But these next two first had to stand in the guard’s line to secure a pass before heading up.  Fine, but that whole process took more than twenty minutes.  Twenty minutes, while my brother lay bureaucratically alone.  

Forty days. Jesus fasted for forty days in the wilderness.  

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The $ubmersible $outh $udan

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June 23, 2023, 5:01 a.m. ET

From a safe American home…

Our modern media world manufactured a new social equation this last week.  While the exact math is still in dispute, it goes something like this:

Five people dying @ $250,000 per joy-ride to disaster-site = five days of lead stories.

A few fringe mathematicians have expanded the equation so the above formula is socially equal to:

120 people dying @ a day of famine/starvation in South Sudan = zero coverage.

Folks, this ain’t the new math.

The War Poets

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It has been a year, a year of bombs and voices. These people speak through translators, these people speak their lives translated through war. This is the collective landscape, wrapped in the mist and myth of the moment, told in the fractured piecemeal that is war.

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Towards Giving It the Olde College Try

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— for Mas’ud Zavarzadeh

I buried it outside the Hall of Languages, at the top of the hill.  Took a shovel, dug a hole in the pristine lawn at the end of the walkway and buried it. No one seemed bothered by it: not the campus police nor the associate prof looking for tenure. No one seemed to care.

That was forty years ago.

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What America Looks Like (Redux)

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See the trailer for What America Looks Like below. Dennis Myers’ documentary about the first two days of the Trump administration, complete with swearing in and swearing, will play at the “Cinema on the Edge” festival in Santa Monica this weekend. If you’re going to be in that town on Sunday around 1:00 p.m., you can see it on a big screen (and get a ticket discount with this code FRIEND10). Or you can watch it online here.

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