I wonder what the orchestra leader known for his speech and good nature would say about this. A man who plagued my childhood when I would have preferred to watch just about anything else, his bubbles and his music were as exciting as watching the rain from my bedroom window. I guess, however, that some of his music infected me, like an invasive species destined to become a parasite and cause me endless confusion about who I was.

As years rolled on, I was doomed, only getting Baltimore AM radio and listening one second to the Beatles, followed without commercial break by Cliff Nobles and then Gladys Knight and the Pips. And the mix was really pretty good, especially since I’d hear Anne Murray next, then Bread, then Led Zeppelin. All for the price of a string of ads that made today’s breaks look like the marathons of torment that they are. The good old days of AM.

Welk was lampooned endlessly and even played himself on a dizzying and hilarious episode of Here’s Lucy. At least that’s how I remember it. You know Lucy. Her brand of G-rated comedy is forever gone, and I’m sorry for that. She always got us with some kooky plot and took us for a ride. One episode had her bragging that she knew Lawrence Welk although she really didn’t. She tries to pretend that a dummy likeness of Welk is real, but her kids have gone behind her and actually gotten the band leader to visit. Front and center was the phrase, “Wunnerful, wunnerful.”

But the man who left the world behind and made his wife of 61 years a widow was like that. And what can be more honorable than gentle, self-effacing humor and a marriage that lasted more than half a century, with three children raised?

Today I can listen to and enjoy any genre of music. Except death metal and gangsta.

Right now in my region the “Generation X” or 17-year cicadas are coming up from the soil, ready to mate and propagate the species. But as scientists a century ago noted, soils in the region contain a fungus that makes the males crazy for sex and makes two thirds of their bodies fall off. Including of course their genitals. Instead, spores take the place of their packages and the fungus is spread during any subsequent attempts to mate. What a hilarious situation, making me think of the human male: bent on, and always scheming, to copulate. I wish some of their packages would fall off.

What a wunnerful world it would be.

While getting my second COVID-19 vaccination I saw a whiteboard scribbled with a bad attempt at poetry. It was about someone whose identity I knew immediately. It went something like, “If you love me, then leave me the hell alone.”

It’s unremarkable until you consider that the workplace is large. And worse when you get that he aimed it at a co-worker. The really bad part is that they not only had a relationship, but that the relationship produced a child.

Excuse me, but that’s some cold shit. Words meant to hurt, for all to see. It is why some companies try to restrict their employees from even dating. It’s understood that after work, there may be gatherings for drinks, but sex is always a bad idea. Romance is really frowned on because when it ends, it often gets pretty intense and ugly. Bad for business to say the very least.

While I can’t possibly tell you a lie, like how human beings can control who they are attracted to or who they fall in love with, I maintain that when things get complicated, the workplace is the last place you want the aftermath to be seen. I’ve seen it happen and bullet holes in a car because of it. Don’t. Date. Anyone. At. Work.

Now the man in this story, he’s human. He couldn’t control who he was attracted to. He couldn’t control his package either, as the resulting child makes abundantly obvious.

But emotions can make anyone do hateful things, or do what’s necessary but in a hateful way.

I say this guy is behaving in such a way that he has caused undue harm which everyone now knows about. That’s something that has a cost, a price which comes due and never expires. We know, in the end, he will be paid back by fate. By karma. By God or whoever or whatever it is that evens up with shitheads like this typical man.

Some things never change.

Some do.

There was a time when such a thing would have caused trouble, and plenty of talk. I heard it decades ago, before the term “just living together” was a thing. I thought it was immoral because that’s what I was taught. Paul Anka made waves in conservative (at that time almost exclusively white) America with his song “(You’re) Having My Baby”, because it was taken that the first-person accounts from the male and then the female in the song were not married. In reality the song explicitly says she didn’t have to do it, she could have had an abortion. So conservative pro-lifers should have liked the song. They have never thought like that, and they never will. They screw their credibility with contradictory stances, statements and deeds.

Conservatives trying to void the election results and the Q movement are doing the same thing. Some idiot lawyer whose name is Lin Wood spouts contradictory bullshit, citing God as being behind Trump, who is still running the government from behind the scenes. During a speech he said that if the military needs a first strike they’ll call Trump for the codes. Adrenaline surging through his veins he then struts the stage, obviously eyeing up the blondes in the back of the stage, then goes on to call Obama, Biden and Bush (?) child sex traffickers.

The jerkoff then says, “Send this video to Hollywood! Send it to the House of Windsor! Send it to the Illuminati!”

What the hell is he talking about and why is he being cheered? Because all of those are involved in right-wing conspiracy theories that are nuts. So nutty in fact that any left-wing fantasy, past or present, is paled by mere cursory comparison. You don’t have to eat a whole apple to know it’s rotten, and this stuff reeks so much that anyone getting close to it must be really sick. They’re missing something that prevents the rest of us from poisoning ourselves on food that stinks to high Heaven, it’s so rancid.

Note: it is United States policy not to make first strikes. Such a thing as a strike would require detection of a launch from another power. Wood is off his rocker. And Trump doesn’t have nuclear weapons codes. Anyone who thinks that is nuttier than squirrel scat.

But if we are even casual students of history, we know that a biased, crazy white man can talk crazy and still gain a tremendous following.

Most of the world knew immediately how dangerous Donald Trump really was. Most of it knows that he is even more dangerous now. Although it is a breach of protocol, the mess in Arizona has spread to Georgia, where a judge ordered a recount and inspection of ballots in Fulton County. The plot to unseat Biden continues. It’s not going away. Like some fungus that makes cicadas go off the deep end, it is not funny enough to just laugh at (it could pose a threat later. Word searches about psilocybin which the fungus produces in the infected insects, the same psychedelic compound in magic shrooms, indicate that people are trying to find out if they can trip by consuming cicadas. No, really. If you have Google set on finishing possible searches related to your first word typed, and you see something there, it’s been searched. And knowing how silly and daring we American fools can be, I would say the searches are by now well into the millions). In January a patient with bipolar disorder went off his medication and tried to self medicate with boiled shroom tea which he injected. The fungus attacked his whole body, liver, kidneys, lungs, and he’s lucky to be alive today.

That’s not even the weirdest “drug misadventure” I’ve heard.

Why are we doing this? Why are we letting it go so wrong? What makes us so damned self destructive?

Even as a ceasefire was negotiated in Israel, a man wearing a yarmulke was attacked and beaten here, in America. He’s not alone. Antisemitism is alive and well.

I understand hate. We all do. We’ve all been targets of it. No one gets out of here without tasting the bitterness of hatred, or hating someone else or even some thing like a job. It can eat you inside out. And when it is let loose, violence often happens.

You know what I hate? Bigotry. Racial hatred and violence. There is no good reason for any of it. Nothing justifies it, yet the threat it represents is lost on those who hate. Saying “Hitler was right” while you’re assaulting a Jewish man is a harsh example of the terrible danger this country, and the world, is in.

Don’t be a part of it.

We can settle differences and disputes. We can talk to each other and listen. We can learn that we can make friends with anyone. That once we get to know another person, it becomes more difficult to hate them so long as they, too are willing to face you and do the same.

But how can we ever get anything right when on a basic level, a man cannot be strong or selfless enough to stand by his child and its mother?

I’ll say that we as a species have the potential for more greatness than we know. But we have turned our planet into a sewer and a toxic waste dump. We’re killing off animal species so fast that our future will be different in ways we cannot now anticipate. Deforestation by humans and wildfires like the one currently going on, which was deliberately set, are decreasing oxygen to noticeable levels. Whole towns are built over and on the sides or bases of volcanoes without regard for the toll if they erupt. We take chances and we dare fate to do anything about it. Find an old, stout tree and climb it. The branches are big enough to walk on. But go too far and you’re done for. So many people climb or attempt to climb Everest that traffic alone risks lives. A lot of people get left up there because they can’t be brought back. We build and buy waterfront homes and disrespect the power of typhoons, tsunamis and hurricanes. And yet we have all the information we need to know how foolish it is. We have become jaded, fearless and selfish. And nobody will talk about whole families living in the streets, no chance to be rescued. We have annual Thanksgiving dinner for the homeless and pat ourselves on the back for our charity. And when the dinner is over, we forget the people who have 365 days to beg for food.

We have become barbaric and uncaring. Celebrities and politicians do things for charity and it gives them extra camera or soapbox time, but how hollow it is for people whose reality will end with their deaths from the elements or disease, their bodies found only when decomposition gets far enough along that no one can miss it.

Doctors used to say that it was a myth, dying of a broken heart. Today not as many do. Some swear it to be the cause of death; that they’ve lost patients that way. I know it happens. My broken heart will eventually kill me. I don’t know why it hasn’t happened yet; perhaps it is the time I spend here with you, hoping, praying that it might help in some way to give a warning, have a word or sentence stick with you, something to pass on. I would be at least useful that way. After all I’ve seen and endured, I really need to feel useful. I’ve gotten some comments that give me hope that I’ve been successful in some way. I even have followers, and that humbles and heartens me. I appreciate every like. I’m honored that people read. But I’m scared. We should all be.

This is a crossroads of history. The world is not at peace. We have caused grievous harm to it. And on a personal level we are bent on hurting each other.

I wonder if Lawrence Welk would think any of this is wunnerful.

I rather doubt it.

It’s so sad when love is over.