*This post contains references to suicide. It’s a thing so final and dark that reading this could cause readers distress. If you or someone you know are thinking about suicide, please call the Suicide Prevention Hotline. Click here for a phone number or online chat.

What is it, Catullus? Why do you not make haste to die?

A famous line, from a famous poet, it seems pathetically straightforward, but it is not. He was a contemporary of Julius Caesar, and was not bashful about including sexual imagery in his poetry. He also took humorous shots at Caesar. Coming from a family of some wealth and prominence, Gāius Valerius Catullus smeared the esteem of Caesar in the public mind. However, the two apparently reconciled. So, who is it then, the man in the curule chair, who tests Catullus so? Who is this ruler who sits in an official’s (curule) chair and makes Catullus question why he is slow to commit suicide?

***

I went out yesterday to get, I hoped, a loaf of bread, some cream for coffee and a 2 litre bottle of zero sugar cola. To my shock, and since the items were generic, I had enough money.

The sun had set. I don’t like being out or even awake during the day. The light hurts my eyes, stabs them like kabob skewers. Everything hurts, but cataracts cause the refraction of light to screw up my vision. I constantly see as if through a dirty window, only pain is involved.

I wish I could say that the walk did me some good. As if it lifted my spirits. Sometimes a walk does that. Not this time. It felt too cold, even with a denim jacket. The crisp air put me to sleep; I napped fitfully with nightmares, then was wide awake. Still dark. Still before midnight. Doomed to rise like a vampire to exist only in the hours when others sleep.

Oh, I know: you think I’m using hyperbole. But I’m not a poet, nor a journalist who needs to use lurid or silly words. Unless, of course, I feel I can use the help. But I’ve actually been accused of being a vampire, because, damn it, people notice weird things like seeing me in daylight only rarely or for short periods, but can easily look from their windows at any hour of the night and see me out front, indulging in a Marlboro. I’ve no doubt also been seen getting my mail at some weird hour.

I like the night. Several jobs I’ve had required me to work exclusively after dark. When driving a tractor-trailer rig, I grew to love those peaceful hours even more; less traffic, fewer speed traps, and definitely, at least on the Interstates, fewer last-call drunks.

Oh, and one more thing. I heard lots of stories about drivers being passed by women in cars. Women in various states of dress. What I mean is, skirts open, no pants, even nude. Now, it has to be pointed out that truckers are, generally, full of shit. When I worked around them as a teen, they told stories, mostly scary stuff, and I’d find out years later that the CB radio had been an internet precursor for urban legends and what we call “Creepypasta”. It was all bullshit.

And I, in the tall seat of a truck, had never seen any women doing what others claimed. Alas!

But one night, perhaps around 03:00, I was on Holabird Avenue, just leaving Lever Brothers with a load of soap and detergent, negotiating a sharp curve and preparing for the steep climb up a ramp to Interstate 95 toward the Fort McHenry Tunnel. A car came up on my left and passed me in the curve, and I looked down to make sure the driver was giving me space since I had to go wide. As I looked, he passed under a powerful street light by the GAF plant and what I saw proved to me just how unfair the universe was. First, because I saw it. Second, I was both jealous and in shock at the same time.

It was a guy. Too late for leaving a bar after Last Call; only after years passed did I face my experience and deduce that he was probably just a pervert.

This dude was hung, and I mean, he looked like a mutant, he was so big. I mean, it could have been a medical experiment gone horribly wrong. These explanations flashed, no pun intended, through my head. Folks, this guy’s penis looked like a hose from a fire engine! It was longer than his thighs, which were naked!

I called in sick the next night. I wasn’t triggered, because I didn’t know that word yet. I felt as if I’d been purposely targeted, like the timing of passing under the light. Felt as if I’d escaped a close call with a fucking tyrannosaurus.

That was my luck. When I delivered pizza, the guys would talk about women answering the door naked. I got the men whose bathrobes just happened to come open while they handed me cash.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not homophobic, and in the service, I’d been okay showering with other soldiers. You get used to it. You take your shower and get out. It’s nothing.

But on the road or at someone’s door, no, I didn’t like my luck. I wasn’t very sorry to leave trucking and pizza behind. Hell, I think it was five years before I even ate a pizza.

***

The night has its hazardous side. But it has a beauty few ever truly dare explore, and more is the pity; it is quite peaceful. The world takes the life out of you. The night is a tonic which restores you, whether you are asleep or not.

The worst things I went through growing up happened at night. Just writing that sentence sent me back there, and now I’m struggling to stop it. But I believe that’s when I developed a fear, not of the night, but of the bad things that came with it. My sleep pattern was changing and in school I had to fight exhaustion along with mental illness.

PTSD doesn’t wait to develop until after all ongoing traumatic experience has ceased. It occurs the instant the first trauma is inflicted and gets worse from there.

***

Catullus was asking himself why he had not killed himself when politicians abused their power. Things must have looked grim. Julius Caesar would go on to be assassinated, but raw and unbridled corruption would ever be present in Rome and the Empire it would soon create. Anyone who saw what it truly was could not have been anything but angry and frightened; enough so to contemplate suicide. And not that long after his time, another man who was unworthy of authority would sit in a curule chair and judge an innocent man, sending him to the cross. Not because of a reasonable doubt, but because he was threatened and had to do it. People cannot often see that they abuse or misuse their power. But most do. Baron Acton wrote:

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.

I may not believe that his observations are absolute, but to those whom this does not apply, there must be the awareness that they are exceptions to the rule.

Senator Mitch McConnell and others have given themselves over to evil, using power to continue the threat to American democracy long since begun, but exacerbated by Donald Trump. Ted Cruz feigned indignation at someone’s Nazi salute. He asked the Attorney General if that was legal. The answer: of course it is. We know Cruz (whose I.Q. is that of tepid water in degrees Fahrenheit), was attempting to catch Garland in some trap. It’s such a lame attempt that I wonder how the man ever survived this long. I picture him amputating a hand with a can opener and say to myself, That could happen.

People influenced by the initial Trump reaction to COVID-19 and his constant attacks on reporters and news outlets, along with the Trump Party movement and lies by anti-vaxxers, have been in school meetings screaming about mask-and-vaccine mandates for their children to be able to go to classes. Screaming. So much so that I’ve read reports on how children are being savagely affected. Yes. Traumatized. Most kids have no problem getting covid shots and wearing masks; it is the parents who are acting like meatballs. They do not ask what their children want. And more than one mother has called compulsory shot mandates “rape”. They obviously don’t know anything about either one. The ignorance is stupefying and utterly ridiculous.

Meanwhile, the political right, both Republican and Trumpian politicians, have set out to shut true democratic processes down.

The United States is currently in the process of a coup.

It’s so severe that in a public meeting, some dickhead asked if it was time to shoot the winners when Republicans lose elections. And the response he got wasn’t exactly a “no”. It is quite staggering to have lived from the Kennedy administration to now, look back and ask, What happened?

Global warming is so terrifying because it’s real. But again, right-wing politicians and the ruling boards of corporations sat on, ignored or bribed around reports from scientists and their recommended solutions that would slow it. That’s criminal conspiracy, and billions of U.S. dollars later, the true picture they knew would come true is coming true: from oil companies to toy manufacturers to farmers, the consumer base is shrinking. By now, even pay raises will not offset the cost of living because the funds to pay more is blatantly passed on to the public: inflation just gets worse. Wages for the majority of workers never have kept up with inflation; now it will get worse.

⁵ And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand.

And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine. Rev. 6:5-6 kjv

In the Chesapeake Bay, on Tangier Island, there’s a bed and breakfast inn that would be charming and great for tourists. But the owner has himself in a bad place. The purchase, the taxes, the renovations, every cent, will be lost. The island is shrinking. Some islands have already vanished beneath the surface. The last holdout on one described what I can only imagine was heartbreaking. As temperatures rise, water is added to by melting ice from the land. Iceberg melt doesn’t do it because they already displace the amount of water that the melt water would occupy. Fresh water glacier melt can’t be replaced by snowfall fast enough and large slices fall into the sea or melt and drain through watersheds. That and the warmth trapped in the oceans (warm water has expanded molecules) causes water levels to rise. Can’t be stopped. The island I used to see when fishing in Tangier Sound will one day vanish.

There is no longer any way anyone can look at all that we face and not come up with, “We’re fucked“.

Every generation since the first century CE has played with predictions of when the “Apocalypse” will happen. Everyone including Christians honestly believed that every war, every natural disaster, every drought followed by famine, were all the beginning of the tribulation, or the end time predicted in apocalyptic writing, and there were more books written in that style than most think.

People have sold or even abandoned homes and literally gone to the hilltops to await the event called “the Rapture” even though nobody can pin down exactly what that is or whether Jesus mentioned it. He didn’t, but text attributed to him implies the famous “one will be taken, the other left.”

The Great War. The second World War. Before those, there were Genghis Kahn, the Empire of Rome, huge volcanic events, history changing earthquakes, the Bubonic Plague, the Crusades.

I don’t think I can say what’s true or not in the Bible, but after Pontius Pilate put Yeshua of Nazareth to death, the final and longest Jewish Diaspora began. And the persecution of Jews would eventually end up in the mass death that was The Holocaust. Jesus probably did predict that. It began when General Titus had legionaries kill Jews and tear down the temple, some thirty or so years after he predicted calamities that would follow his death.

Ever since 1946, Israeli agents have hunted the Nazis who escaped the trials at Nuremberg. Slowly, methodically and with vengeance burning inside each.

Each generation, no matter its race or religion, has faced the question, “Is this the end?”

Those who had to stay on hilltops until nightfall brought cold and chilling dampness, because Jesus never plucked them up and took them to Heaven, have suffered the ridicule of others when they asked for their old jobs. Or had to borrow food or money. And the next time their crank priest predicted the end of the world, he climbed the hill to find fewer people (perhaps they finally understood why Jesus said to his Apostles, “Of that day and hour no one knows, not even I, only the Father.”).

But global warming has made me rethink the above verses from The Book of Revelation. Because, note that it isn’t what it seems. On a glance, it’s easy. Inflation, one measure of wheat for a day’s pay. That’s Inflation.

Except it’s more than that. It also indicates famine, and global warming will make (already is) crops fail as climate zones change. In other words, what will grow in a certain region (in this case grapes for wine) will no longer do so. Prime land for grapes will move north, and the north will yet still be hostile as far as rich soil.

We’re not sure which kind of oil is being referenced but it isn’t petroleum. Most likely olive oil, and olives will wither in their groves, burned on the branches and starved for water.

But there’s more to the horseman on the black horse, the only one among four which rides forth with instructions. This means that doing no harm to oil and wine indicates only the very rich and greedy will be able to have such things, and they’ll reap the whirlwind. Greed and power will show the poor in those days exactly the kind of men they have been following.

Greed and power, corrupting absolutely. The poor are spat upon by them. Men like Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell never cared about anyone. McConnell and others, when told that if food assistance programs were stopped, a lot of people would die, replied to the effect, “Let them die.”

The people who support men like them are brainwashed by idiots on Fox News and the men themselves. They believe everything they’ve been told and now, to keep their ilk in power, are contemplating the assassination of anyone they don’t like who wins an election. Men sit in seats of power, the curule chairs, and the world has never seen anything like what’s coming. I wonder what Catullus would write now: would he give these monsters the literary pasting they deserve? Would he become hopeless and hang himself?

I think not.

I believe he would fight with written and spoken word and serve up great helpings of blunt truth laced with very colorful words.

I can’t see the light. It hurts. From dark things I’ve come, to live in darkness, to think from darkness, to see only darkness. I see bad things coming. Things I hope I’m wrong about. Things I pray that I am wrong about.

But it’s not always so bad. It’s peaceful here at night. So very peaceful.

I am doomed to be a child of the night. Born from darkness, only to end up fearing what the night would bring as I grew up. I may not drink blood, but I am absolutely undead, a vampire. A survivor who just can’t seem to fall down and die. I do not hasten to it.

Sometimes I wish I were a poet.

Lord knows, I should be. But then again, Catullus and Poe have already been here. How could I ever top them?

Thank you for being here when I need you. Be well.