Episode 7

My heart hurts. My brain hurts. And also wherever the things we care about most are held within us, that part of me aches unbearably. I know you feel it, too.

This past week, the personification of sadistic sociopathic malignant narcissism proclaimed its foul self king, complete with a pathetic likeness in a gold crown— proving that senility has set in so deeply that this living atrocity views itself as deserving said headwear, let alone a role as ruler over all. The royal pain proudly posted this wet dream-meme at the same equal-parts-hilarious-and-horrifying time that it is being led by a ring through its ample-flab-of-self-absorption by the richest monster in the world: Muskputin.

This farcical self-crowning would be funny if it weren’t so atrocious. It’s enervating to even try to find a way to react, because doing so—even if I could find a meaningful response for it—would somehow create a place for it in my mind. And I don’t want a place for it in my life, let alone my mind.

I have to pause here and say: I am livid. You can probably tell I’m livid, right? I told you up front that I hurt, but I bet you surmised from the follow-on that I’m also furious. It’s a sure bet for almost anyone experiencing take-hand-from-fire pain that they are unlikely to intone beautiful blessings upon the source of said searing and far more likely to damn it.

Dammit! And while I am paused, I want to promise you that I am going to tell you a WILD story before I am done, but first I have to tell you a bit more of what has got me to the state of remembering the time I had to sit alone a long while with a corpse in the cold at sunset. So… more about what has got me here.

This was another tolerance debilitator this week: watching Peter Thiel’s bought-and-paid-for-dictator-loving-vice-whatever we have now in the White House scold the leaders of the world at the Munich Security Conference as he told them that the US—my country—is going to take all its titanic toys and protective power and couple up with our new darling despot ruling Russia. So the NATO accord and the peaceful order of nations we’ve been wed to for over 75 years can just wither and die, because the big boys plan to screw the world, and there is nothing our longsuffering, faithful partners can do about it.

Then this stab-wound: The right-out-in-public plotting to dismember Ukraine just like crowned murderer MBS ordered American journalist Jamal Khashoggi hacked into pieces. That same depraved demon prince met with the equally ruthless reps for the Russian oligarchy and our official emissaries (including our newly-minted Secretary of State, eager to get some inhumanity on him). The meet was designed to divide up the spoils of that beleaguered and war-ravaged democracy that has been doing the job for the whole world of keeping Russia at bay. News stories carrying the pool photo of those smiling Ukraine-gang-bangers around a shiny table festooned with fresh flowers actually ran with headlines bearing the words “peace talks” in them.

The twist of the knife in that last part—that the press put the words “peace talks” anywhere in the same Universe with images of that gathering of ghouls—is what makes my brain seek the blessed oblivion of vacancy.

Day after day, there’s a bombardment of butchering, an onslaught of affrontery. A smashing and ripping down of the walls of our democracy and the ramparts of the world order that our greatest generation (and generations before them) paid for with real blood and sacrifice.

I lack the effective means and speed of processing the onslaught of offenses, and being constantly beset, I feel like I’m being waterboarded. I grapple daily not to absorb a glut of indigestible poison. There is no way to find comfort under these conditions. You either pass out and seek oblivion, or you keep choking and writhing, praying that it will end, and at a certain point, you almost could care less about how it will end than that it will end.

They pour it on. The corrupt cabal spew it out—the putrid lies, the inhumane insults, the Nazism, the Christo Fascism, the polluted propaganda—while a fester of idiots cheer. An incoherent ketamine-jacked apartheid-bred billionaire hellhound waves a chainsaw and when asked about it, can’t complete a sentence. A convicted criminal three-shirt performs the Sieg Heil from the podium. And the already-doubtful decency and integrity of a majority of US Senators and Congress members disintegrates and commences to putrefy in plain view as their spineless, gelatinous near-corpses recite drivel while they contemplate the wealth their merciless, self-debasing sellout will bring.

My anger extends to the idiocy of what got us here: millions of prats—too lazy to stay informed, too gullible to test facts, too filled with fabricated grievances and eager to hate and dominate—who marched in lockstep to the polls and sold democracy down the sewer that was dug for them by demons spewing propaganda.

So let me tell you a story that comes to mind when I am awash with this mix of anger, incomprehension, and overwhelment.

One late afternoon in winter, I was working on my second book in the tiny office we’d built onto the side of our cabin, an office that I called “the sky chapel” because we’d installed windows all around to let in the light, and sky-windows in its slanted roof that looked up through the arms of Ponderosa pines, which—like stained glass—would color the light coming through and rippling along the walls and the top of my desk. In summer, with those sky windows open, the long needles of the pines, when stirred by the wind, sounded like distant harps playing. It was my sacred place. But on this day, the light of the afternoon was slipping away in the valley as the winter sun began to sink behind the tall peaks that surrounded it, becoming twilight already at just past 3PM. A pack of old snow clung to the ground.

My fire radio interrupted the quiet with a loud tone; then a gravelly dispatcher’s voice summoned our volunteer fire department to respond for a house fire. I jumped up, grabbed my keys, went out to my Jeep, and drove down the graded dirt and gravel road to the fire station.

Since most of our crew worked at day jobs down on the flats, only three of us responded to the call: the chief, one of our EMTs, and me. We all jumped in the engine and left immediately. It turns out I could have arrived on the scene much sooner if I’d skipped going to the station. The location of the reported house fire was just a half-mile up the road from my place. The dispatcher told us that a local resident on a hike had spotted black smoke coming from the garage at that address, and called 911.

This was not a house fire. The garage door was not locked. The chief and the EMT lifted the door, and a gush of black exhaust fumes rolled down the gravel drive towards the truck, where I was grabbing the med kit with the AED out of a side panel. The guys pulled a man from the driver’s seat and out of the garage while I ran in to turn off the engine of the car.

We were too late. The victim was already cold, his limbs had begun to stiffen, the blood he had vomited had dried on the sweatshirt and pants he wore, and although we performed all the necessary attempts to resuscitate, we called the time of death soon after we arrived. The last light of day had left the valley now, and a blue twilight had set in. The only tracks in the snow covering the driveway were those of our engine. I used my radio to ask dispatch to alert the coroner to come to the scene.

My request had not yet been acknowledged when we received another tone on the radio. A rescue: car versus cliff wall, on the part of the highway we referred to by mile marker on the radio, but privately among ourselves as Dead Man’s Curve.

There is a legal requirement for first responders to maintain a chain of custody of a corpse. One of us had to stay with the body to wait for the coroner or a sheriff’s deputy to assume the chain. The chief asked me if I would be okay waiting there alone with the recently deceased. This was not my first rodeo with a victim who had died. I told him I would be fine.

Unfortunately, that day turned out to be a very busy day for the coroner, the sheriff’s department, and first responders in that part of the Rockies. Icy roads contributed to multiple accidents across two counties, and several of them had been deadly. The radio periodically sputtered to life with calls going out to various agencies, then fell quiet as each team moved their radio traffic to separate channels. I spent a long time in the deepening darkness and cold with the remains of a man who had decided that it was all too much for him to bear and had chosen a way out.

In the silence of nightfall, I alternately squatted on the driveway and drew my arms around me, or got up and moved around in bursts of exercise to stay warm. It began to snow softly. A car came up the road and turned into the bottom of the drive. A man and a woman each got out, older folks and not sure-footed, and they left the car doors open and the lights on as they started towards me. But I moved quickly to cut off their approach by sprinting down the long drive.

“Folks, this is an emergency scene,” I said, turning on my headlamp and flashlight. “I’m going to ask you to get back in your car and move along.”

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” The man asked, “Our son is dead?” The woman let out a wail.

“Yes,” I answered, as I went to her and helped her up the drive.

For nearly an hour, I stood with the parents. They approached the body, but stopped a few feet away, and went no farther. They did not ask to look under the sheet I had taken from the bed in the house to cover him. Instead, they spent the first hour in which they knew their son was gone forever telling me their sad story.

The victim had been an alcoholic for decades. He had been an electrician but after a time could not hold down a job. During the time that they raised their son, the parents had lived right there—in the house where he died. But her extended bout with a respiratory ailment caused them to move to a lower elevation, so they rented a few rooms in town, thinking they could come back home when she got better. But she hadn’t; they had been away for several years. When their son lost his job, then his wife, his house, and then his health due to his drinking, they had intervened repeatedly to try to help, lending money that was never repaid, letting him sleep on their couch. Finally, they had given him the keys to their home in the mountains. “We hoped he would find peace, here,” the mother said, “and would stop drinking.”

“When did you last visit him?” I asked. I had not even known this house was occupied, because I hiked Tiwa up past the drive every day on our way up to Button Rock. I didn’t remember ever seeing a car come and go, or any lights on. That’s something you are aware of when you live down a road with only three or four houses on it.

“We didn’t,” the father said. “We just gave him the keys a few weeks ago. We couldn’t reason with him. And we couldn’t bear to see him like that. He had ulcers on his esophagus, and they kept bleeding and nearly suffocating him. He went to the emergency room a dozen times. The doctors told him he would die if he didn’t stop drinking.”

“Today, I just had a terrible feeling,” the mother said, sobbing. “I couldn’t shake it. We had a lot of problems when he was growing up.” The two parents looked at one another. “We had a lot of problems and he… he got into trouble, but he was our boy! We kept thinking he would be all right, and we kept bailing him out. We made excuses for him, but then he started stealing from us. We were already going bankrupt paying for the lawyers. He was getting meaner…” Her voice trailed off.

I’ll come back to this story, sad as it is, in just a bit. But I am remembering it together with how furious I feel about our current situation—because there is a parallel. So let me cite the similarity. Here we all are, aggrieved and angry, as a looming tragedy is palpable everywhere in our country and across the globe right now. The offenders have been allowed to run rampant in their power-hungry addiction to greed and control. They celebrate their own cruelty as they create and share what they laughingly refer to as “ASMR” videos of poor people in chains being herded up a ramp into a military cargo plane. This is not funny, but they laugh and laugh, proudly showing their diseased souls, proving that they are beyond the hope of redemption.

Oblivious to the trauma they cause, they dance around with chain saws and give the Nazi salute, drunk on the power that millions of enabling people gave them…those voters turning their heads away as the doom signals kept sounding. The kings of pain tear down our alliances, they fire all the people who make our government work, bore into our private data, as they rip apart the fabric of health, prosperity, and peace that so many have worked so hard to build for our country, but they continue because they are backed by a host of ignorant, incapable, self-absorbed people who swallowed the piles of lies and gave the billionaire kings the keys to our democracy.

That night on the cold drive up the road from my house where I sat with a dead man who had torn down everything his parents had, left them heartbroken but even more devastated with the knowledge that they had played a part in the tragedy that befell them, I remember the sinking feeling in my chest as the parents got back in their car and drove away. I gulped in great drafts of the cold air, hoping to flush out the exhaust from the tragedy.

The coroner finally came. He took one look at the deceased and said, “I see too much of this shit.” His wagon had a fancy lift, and he didn’t even need my help to get the body loaded. The radio had gone quiet so there was no reason for me to go down to the station. I started walking down the road towards my place.

The king of pain that day was a drunk who couldn’t give up his addiction. The world around him suffered for that, including those who had to respond to his final act. We were too late to save him, or his parents, who had let his disease rule as he gradually took most—if not all—of what they had worked for all their lives with him. As far as anyone knew, the parents never returned to the valley after that day.

That spring, a realtor put the death house on the market, but it never sold. The stink of the exhaust had permeated the whole place through the heating vents, and could never be scrubbed out. A wrecking crew showed up in the summer and tore the house down. The nearest neighbor purchased the land to increase his acreage.

The dreams of a family died that day, but the doom had been long foreshadowed by the unconstrained actions of a king of pain. The people who kept picking him up and propping him on his throne, despite his obvious unfitness, would rue their own part in the story.

We face a similar situation on an epic scale in this country today. But in this case, if one king dies, a lineup of already-empowered evil overlords waits in the wings to take the throne. And there is much more at stake than one life, one home, one family. The future of democracy around the globe—and possibly even the survival from war, famine, disease, and the collapse of democracy itself for whole masses of humanity—depend upon the decisions made by who leads the United States of America, and the leaders of other nations with whom we are allied.

What generations before us have given immeasurably for us to have: the peace, the prosperity, the good will among nations—this is all being ripped away by billionaire kings of pain. And we may never be able to have it again. Too many turned their heads and looked elsewhere as the smoke of a million lies mounted to taint our atmosphere with poison. Too many let the cons prevail; and the worst among us in the American family pulled the levers in the voting booths, driven by their own lack of integrity. They gave the kings of pain the keys to the only home we had.

I don’t want to watch the United States of America immolate at the hands of the king of pain. I don’t want to come sit with the body, or wait for the coroner to come. In this case, our current king of pain doesn’t plan to destroy himself. But he and his co-kings don’t care that they are destroying all that we have. We need to take back the keys before they destroy any chance we have of saving ourselves and our home.

I know some of you are just un-numbing and now feeling the hurt. Some of you are worn down from facing it for some time. Either way, I urge you to step up in every way you can. Pressure your representatives to help us take back the keys. Join a group of citizens in your community fighting for justice. Support those working on the front lines legally, and join those standing on the front lines physically. Support truthful media. Raise your voice. Don’t wait until it’s too late.

This has been Sandi Ault—Reporting from the WILD. You can also listen to my stories on the companion podcast to this blog—wherever podcasts are found.

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Take care.