#do i think they should have kept his hometown as el paso

[blitzythefanvergentpitsterthings]

Blue Beetle (2023) was so GOOD yall

I'm so excited honestly I've loved bb for forever and its always so hard finding good merch and he finally got his own feature film! That looks good! It was good! The visuals were beautiful! And now more people will be aware of this precious ray of sunshine! I'm excited!

[smallerinfinities]

Shawn Weekend 2k18 🌸

Okay, so, most of you know that this weekend I saw Shawn twice in 24 hours. Once in El Paso and once in Austin at ACL. My sister, who hates planes and has an anxiety disorder and claustrophobia, is a fucking CHAMP for doing all of this with me.

This is the crazy tale (WITH PHOTOS).

Saturday morning, my sister and I got up and headed to the airport after like four hours of Friday ACL (we saw Khalid and Hozier). Everything actually ran smoothly with no delays (something I was freaking out about when I planned this whole adventure). We got there and got ready at the hotel and left for the venue about 30 minutes before doors opened.

First thing, UTEP was not prepared for this. It was after the show start time before I got into the building. To accommodate poor planning, the show didn't actually start until 8. The crowd was a good mix of people and the arena was so small that there wasn't really a bad seat in the house, though I definitely want to argue that our seats were Special™️ because we were basically at Shawn's eye level the whole time. Example:

So, the show starts. He played the long festival set that we’re all familiar with at this point, but when “Youth” was up next, he brought out Khalid. Khalid is from El Paso. THE ARENA BLEW THE FUCK UP. My eardrums were vibrating hard. Like, Hometown Hero is an understatement I thought my hearing was officially dunzo. They sang “Youth” together and then Khalid sang “Young Dumb & Broke” and Shawn looked like the happiest boy in the world watching his friend fucking own the stage. It was my favorite part of the night, tbh, just watching Shawn be stupid happy. 

Highlights included: lighting the whole arena with cell phone lights for “Never Be Alone,” the “Bad Rep” high note, hearing “Ruin” live for the first time, and getting to do the “woahhhh, ohhhh, ohhh, ohhhh” in IMB. OH AND HEARING “FALLIN’ ALL IN YOU” LIVE BECAUSE HE DIDN’T DO IT AT ACL! 

After the show, I was LIT. Like, we had an 8 AM flight. I didn’t go to bed until after 2 and my alarm went off at 6. But, I felt nothing. I should have been a zombie but I was so amped for the festival, his LAST FESTIVAL TOUR SET, that I was living on adrenaline. So, we boarded the plane and I put some glitter and shit on my face. We went straight to the festival grounds, rolling up to the Honda Stage at 11:30. There were already girls all along the barricade, but we were right next to the center aisle barricades and about 12 people deep from the corner. 

Y’ALL IT WAS SO FUCKING HOT. It had rained in the morning so it was about 85% humidity and 89 degrees so the heat index was 99-100 degrees all damn day and by the changeover after X Ambassadors, we were all completely pressed against each other, back to front (this weekend has taught me that Shawn fans are actually nice and considerate people at festivals because we all kept tabs on who was there before and let them back in when they left but didn’t allow people who just pushed their way in through), but we’d all been there for so long that we’d talked and stuff. We all became close personal friends after several hours lol (the people around me got there around the same time and we all stood NO SITTING OR PEEING OR MOVING FOR 7 1/2 HOURS).

There was a final push when he came on and THE SOUND WAS FUCKING INSANE THERE WERE SO MANY PEOPLE THERE.

He came on stage and you could feel the energy though...like the people and just knowing it was the last festival set, idk like you could tell Shawn was living his best life at that moment. SO SMILEY. SO SWEATY. Everyone was going all out.

(I already posted some of these but I don't care they're too good LOL)

I tried to not use my phone as much at ACL since I'd seen the set the night before and taken photos but the "Ruin" crowd run was a MUST. IT WAS SO FUCKING CRAZY WHEN HE CAME DOWN THE AISLE. PEOPLE WERE PUSHING SO HARD.

But I was prepared with my photo burst (that I promptly forgot about until TODAY IN THE CAR WHEN I OPENED IT UP AND FOUND THE GOD OF ALL PHOTOS)

FUCKING LOOK AT HIMMM

(I cried in the car when I realized I got him that close)

He wasn't a headliner so he played an abridged long set without "Fallin' All In You" and "Never Be Alone." The "Youth" intro guitar shred was a highlight for me because he didn't do it the night before and experiencing the crowd participation stuff in a crowd that large was UNREAL. Like, IMB was really special. My sister cried.

(This one with his hand on his chest really kills me.)

During WWYITM, I SWEAR TO FUCKING GOD WE HAD A MOMENT. I held up my hand and did the toddler wave at him while no one around me had their hand up and HE WAVED BACK AT ME WITH THE SAME WAVE. I do not have evidence of this and my friends keep trying to take it away from me but NO ONE CAN CONVINCE ME THAT THE WAVE WAS NOT FOR ME. Like, FUCK OFF AND LET ME HAVE THIS.

IT WAS ALL SO, SO GOOD. Like, he was in white and buttons were unbuttoned and he was sweaty as hell like the rest of us...I mean I'll never do a music festival again because fuck the stress basically killed me and my body might not ever recover...but I'm so glad I did all of it because it's something that I'll never forget.

After Shawn ended, I found/met for the first time @the-claire-bitch-project (HI CLAIRE!!!) and she stood by while I talked my sister through a panic attack because the Arctic Monkeys people wouldn't let us out as they pushed forward (I cannot tell you how much I love her for loving me enough to put herself through all of this for me).

On the way home I had a couple of breakdowns because just the whole thing was so overwhelming. Like, he's so great. He's so perfect. I was close enough to see his face and his smile and his eyes and I just....I don't know how I survived. I might not have. I might be posting from the grave.

I don't think I'm ever going to get over this weekend. It was the most physically and emotionally exhausting thing I've ever done. I woke up at 3 AM and cried because my arms were in so much pain. My body absolutely hates me, but my inner and outer fangirl has been screaming for DAYS. To top it off, I pulled over on my way home today at noon to buy tickets to Jingle Ball in Dallas...because he brings out the true crazy in me.

To end, I give you the first photo of Shawn and I which will be featured heavily at our wedding 😂 BYEEEEEEEEEE.

[toldnews-blog]

New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/politics/former-texas-congressman-beto-orourke-announces-2020-presidential-bid/

Former Texas Congressman Beto O'Rourke announces 2020 presidential bid

Former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke, whose ultimately unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate in 2018 earned him a fervent and national following, announced Thursday morning that he is running for president in 2020.

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“This is a defining moment of truth for this country and for every single one of us,” O’Rourke said sitting alongside his wife, Amy, in his official announcement video released Thursday morning. “The challenges that we face right now; the interconnected crises in our economy, our democracy and our climate have never been greater.”

In kicking off his campaign, O’Rourke hit on a laundry list of policy issues that will dominate the discussion throughout the Democratic primary, from health care, to combatting climate change and reframing the debate around an issue President Donald Trump has sought to define throughout his first two years in office: immigration.

“All of us, wherever you live, can acknowledge that if immigration is a problem, it’s the best possible problem for this country to have, and we should ensure that there are lawful paths to work, to be with family, and to flee persecution,” O’Rourke said.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images, FILE

Rep. Beto O’Rourke leaves his neighborhood polling place after voting on Election Day, Nov. 06, 2018 in El Paso, Texas.

O’Rourke also said his campaign will be about confronting “the hard truths of slavery, and segregation and suppression in these United States of America.”

The native Texan also previewed an upcoming event in his hometown of El Paso on March 30, which will likely serve as an official launching pad for his presidential bid.

O’Rourke, 46, will begin his presidential campaign in the crucial early voting state of Iowa, embarking on a three-day swing through Iowa starting Thursday afternoon to introduce himself to voters and begin to distinguish himself amid a crowded Democratic field of more than a dozen candidates.

While in Iowa, O’Rourke plans to visit eight counties that voted for Barack Obama in 2012 before flipping to Trump in 2016, a sign that he is already hoping to target voters that have gravitated away from the Democratic Party in recent years.

O’Rourke will also campaign this Saturday for Democratic state Senate candidate Eric Giddens, an appearance confirmed earlier this week in a video posted on Twitter.

However, the trip to Iowa this weekend comes as O’Rourke appears to have lost early ground against his potential Democratic rivals.

While a December 2018 Des Moines Register poll of likely Iowa Democratic caucus-goers showed O’Roruke garnering 11 percent of the vote, a poll by the same outlet released this past weekend showed his support had dipped to just 5 percent.

But despite the likely difficult road ahead, O’Rourke’s foray into the presidential race is the culmination of an unlikely political rise that began with the three-term congressman and former El Paso City Councilman’s decision to challenge Republican Sen. Ted Cruz in the 2018 U.S. Senate race in Texas.

Following his narrow loss to Cruz the months of speculation around O’Rourke’s political future kept him in the conversation about possible contenders for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, despite questions over whether or not a failed Senate candidate with a thin congressional record could be a viable candidate.

However O’Rourke’s unorthodox Senate campaign, which shunned traditional strategists and instead relied on the candidate’s organic appeal, broke fundraising records and earned him a national profile that he now hopes will take him all the way to the White House.

His off-the-cuff style, typified by his campaign’s frequent livestreams that showed the candidate in intimate settings with supporters and his family, endeared him to a national audience, even if it did not ultimately earn him a seat in the U.S. Senate.

In an interview published Wednesday in Vanity Fair magazine, O’Rourke stopped just short of announcing a presidential bid, but made it clear he believes he can find success in the Democratic field.

Tom Reel/San Antonio Express-News/Reuters

Rep. Beto O’Rourke speaks, as Senator Ted Cruz looks on, during a debate at the KENS-5 Studios in San Antonio, Texas, Oct. 16, 2018.

“You can probably tell that I want to run,” O’Rourke said. “I do. I think I’d be good at it. This is the fight of our lives. Not the fight-of-my-political-life kind of crap. But, like, this is the fight of our lives as Americans, and as humans, I’d argue.”

Last month O’Rourke teased an upcoming announcement that led many to believe he would seek the Democratic nomination for president, saying that he and wife Amy had made a decision regarding his political future.

“Amy and I have made a decision about how we can best serve our country,” O’Rourke told The Dallas Morning News in a statement confirmed by ABC News. “We are excited to share it with everyone soon.”

That statement followed a high-profile interview with Oprah Winfrey in early February, where O’Rourke said we would make a decision on a presidential run by the end of the month.

“We want to play as great a role as possible making sure that this country lives up to our expectations, to the promise, to the potential that we all know her to have,” O’Rourke said.

A few weeks after that interview O’Rourke led a counter-rally during President Donald Trump’s visit to El Paso, an enticing split-screen that provided him with a platform to directly take on Trump in his hometown.

The former congressman has also visited the state of Wisconsin earlier this month, meeting with students at a technical college in Milwaukee and at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

But as he enters a crowded Democratic primary field that already includes six U.S. senators, O’Rourke will likely face questions about whether he has the experience to be commander-in-chief.

The political path of the former El Paso city councilman who went on to represent the city for three terms in the U.S. House has garnered comparisons to President Abraham Lincoln, who ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 1858, only to win the presidency two years later.

[adgradlife]

Meet Mo Pittle, Creative Director Turned Food Truck Owner

Image by: JewBoy Burgers

Behind the grill of this black and white mobile food joint, stands Morris (Mo) Pittle, Creative Director of Two Ton Creativity, UT alum and owner of JewBoy Burgers. I met Mo a few weeks after his truck opened last fall, where we small-talked about latkas and queso burgers… and then I learned about his career background. Intrigued, I sat down with Mo to get the full story on how he went from the advertising industry to the restaurant industry.

Why did you choose to go into advertising?

I decided I wanted to work in a field where I never had to have the same day twice. I met with Debbie Rothschild in the department of advertising [at The University of Texas at Austin.] She enlightened me to the creative sequence. I failed to get in on my first try. If it wasn’t for Deborah Morrison, who is now at Oregon, I probably wouldn’t have gotten in the second time.

What is your advertising background?

I started in San Diego at VitroRobertson as an intern then as a junior copywriter. Went to Phoenix from there and got fired for the first time in my life for calling the agency, “hacks.” Then went to Atlanta where I worked at several shops. From Atlanta, I was in Pittsburgh for a little, then from there went to Arnold in D.C.

From there I was going to take a job in Phoenix again to get back to the southwest, but it fell through. So I decided it was a sign and went back to my hometown of El Paso and opened Two Ton Creativity. I thought I knew what I was doing. I didn’t. But I worked through it and we grew steadily then quickly. A few years back the overhead got to me and I transitioned the shop from brick and mortar to project based and now only use freelancers. I kept a few of the clients I liked and moved back to Austin. I have been consulting and mostly working in content development (production). I’ve done everything from helping nonprofits develop realistic marketing plans to directing and producing a full pilot for a magazine called Hemmings. As a creative, you have to acknowledge when you’re no longer the freshest. It’s a lot like being an athlete. You get older and wiser, but eventually, you’re going to want to yield to a young talent that has the stamina to kill it. Best thing you can do is become good at recognizing what you do best and find the best people to do the rest for you. That’s me today.

Image by JewBoy Burgers

Why did you choose to do a food truck?

It recently occurred to me that, statistically, I just passed the midpoint of my life. I felt like it was a good time to create my own brand. I needed the creative refresher.

The food truck business has a relatively low cost of entry (compared to a brick and mortar restaurant) and to me, remains one of the categories where creativity can be a huge driver (no pun intended). Since food has always been near and dear to me, I figured it was a good vehicle (oh my, again with the puns) to express my own brand.

Why the name “JewBoy”?

A good brand is going to be a perfect balance of emotional and rational thinking. It should be something that’s memorable and engaging, but also have relevance and be honest and not contrived. Growing up in El Paso, Texas, a primarily Hispanic community in a traditional Jewish home gave me a somewhat unique perspective. I guess I was insulated from the stereotypes of one culture and overexposed to the stereotypes of another. A common colloquialism among my friends was to refer to each other as “homeboys.” When they found out I was Jewish, I simply became “JewBoy.” It was never derogatory or mean spirited, in fact, looking back on it, I guess I owned it and it came to define me.

So back to the product. I love the way Mexican food restaurants make burgers. There’s something about the taste that comes from the mixture of the two cuisines. So I took what I loved about that, mixed it with my exposure to Jewish and east coast fare and there you go, a product that reflects me and my perspective: honest, real and hopefully, relevant to the consumer.

How has being in advertising helped you and your business?

Since the business is only four months old, I can’t honestly say how it’s helped yet, but I hope that it will create a separation from not only all of the other food trucks out there, but the burger category in general. Looking at the statistics, it’s unbelievable to me that anyone would go into a field like this without a solid background in marketing or at least, marketing resources to have that at your disposal. I had a lot of resources to draw from and favors to call in, which is always a nice thing when starting a new venture.

Any advice for those who are still in school?

Learn what’s practical.

Know the industry you’re getting into and understand what’s happening and who is killing it.

If you don’t love what you do, find a way to love it or do something else. It’s the only way you’re going to excel. Apathy is a killer.

Dig in and work like a maniac. It will pay off.

Lastly, don’t lose sight of who you are and what you want to accomplish. The "real world” has a way of bleeding that out of you. Who really wants to look back on it all and say that the biggest thing I accomplished was “I did what I was told to do.”

[thisdaynews]

Beto O’Rourke’s Campaign Found New Meaning in the Gun Debate. But Is He Hurting the Cause?

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/beto-orourkes-campaign-found-new-meaning-in-the-gun-debate-but-is-he-hurting-the-cause/

Beto O’Rourke’s Campaign Found New Meaning in the Gun Debate. But Is He Hurting the Cause?

DENVER—Tom Sullivan, a Colorado state lawmaker whose son, Alex, was killed in the Aurora theater shooting in 2012, met Beto O’Rourke one cloudless morning in September and, inside a glass-and-brick office building in downtown Denver, introduced him to several other people whose friends or relatives had been killed in mass shootings.

They were seated at a table in a third-floor conference room of the Colorado Trial Lawyers Association, beside a largely untouched basket of bagels and a box of Starbucks coffee. Jane Dougherty, whose sister Mary Sherlach was murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012, brought up the moment, at a presidential debate in Houston the previous week,when O’Rourke had said, “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47.”

Story Continued Below

“I think I was jumping around in my family room, because my sister was murdered by an AR-15,” Dougherty said.

Coni Sanders, whose father, Dave, was killed in the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School, where he was a teacher, said she had rushed toward the television in her living room, hurting her head on a door jamb before sitting down on the floor and watching in disbelief. “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” Sanders said. Brandon Kellogg, a student at Columbine during the massacre, said that, sitting on his couch watching the debate that night, he cried.

O’Rourke swallowed.

In March, when the former Texas congressman entered the presidential race amid soaring expectations, his biggest liability was a perceived lack of solemnity. That perception was reinforced by a meandering road trip throughout the Southwest, a “born to be in it”Vanity Faircover story,and a penchant for standing on tables and chairs. Then, he sank in public opinion polls, watched his fundraising fall off and drifted throughout the early stages of the primary, overwhelmed by a field of more experienced competitors.

But now O’Rourke, while still running far behind in the 2020 field, finds himself at the center of one of the Democratic primary’s gravest and most divisive policy disputes. After the shooting massacre at a Walmart in his hometown of El Paso, Texas, in August, O’Rourke proposed a mandatory buyback of all assault weapons—a kind of eminent domain for guns. The proposal—and the pressure it has put on his competitors to respond—has amplified the gun control discussion in the 2020 primary and pushed it further to the left. And O’Rourke’s intense focus on the issue, including events like the one in Denver, has given his faltering campaign new meaning.

“We have to continue to keep this issue front and center if we’re going to make any progress on it,” O’Rourke told me recently over pasta at Fish Nor Fowl, a restaurant in Pittsburgh’s east end, during a campaign swing through Pennsylvania on the day he turned 47. “And I have an opportunity to do that.”

How long O’Rourke will have that opportunity is unclear. He is polling at 2 percent or 3 percent nationally in the primary. And, he told me, “I cannot fathom a scenario where I would run for public office again if I’m not the nominee.”

Barring upheaval in the primary, O’Rourke’s focus on gun control will not make him president. More than that, he might be hurting his own crusade. His buyback proposal thrust him into conflict, not only with President Donald Trump and the National Rifle Association, but with some of his party’s leaders, who fear O’Rourke will alienate moderate voters and hinder Democrats’ ability to negotiate more modest gun reforms in Congress, especially if the Senate remains in Republican hands after the 2020 election.

“Dummy Beto made it much harder to make a deal,” Trump tweeted last month, and many Democrats on Capitol Hill agreed.

O’Rourke acknowledges that calling for a mandatory buyback “may be politically difficult” and “might diminish our prospects in the next election, whether you’re a member of Congress or whether you’re a candidate for the presidency.” But he also believes his critics are misreading shifts in public opinion. Near the end of the meeting in Denver, he pledged, “I’m in all the way.”

Lonnie Phillips, whose daughter was killed in Aurora, told O’Rourke that he had “stepped in shit.”

“They’re going to come after you,” Phillips said, while assuring O’Rourke that he has “an army behind you.”

“You don’t back down,” he added.

***

O’Rourke no longer owns a gun,but he grew up around them in West Texas. He told me his father, Pat, kept a handgun in his sock drawer and an inherited “arsenal” of handguns, shotguns and rifles in a basement closet. O’Rourke used to take a .22-caliber rifle into the desert to shoot bottles and cans, and he has gone hunting with friends.

Early in his near-miss Senate run against Ted Cruz last year, a friend advised O’Rourke to “make sure that you’re seen in church every Sunday, make sure that they get a picture of you wearing boots and carrying a gun around,” O’Rourke said. “And I was just like, you know what, none of that is me. I don’t go to church every Sunday. I don’t carry a gun. I don’t have a gun.”

During his Senate campaign, O’Rourke supported renewed efforts to pass an assault weapons ban. But running in a Republican- and gun-rich state, he repeatedly said he had no desire to take weapons from people who already owned them. Early in his presidential run, O’Rourke pursued a standard Democratic menu of gun reforms, including universal background checks and red-flag laws.

The idea of a mandatory buyback, he said, “just was not part of the dialogue. And it doesn’t justify the position or make it OK … but that is, perhaps like a lot of people, where I was.”

That changed after a gunman wielding an AK-47-style riflekilled 22 people in El Paso. On the morning of the shooting, O’Rourke was speaking at a labor forum in Las Vegas and became shaken when the first reports of deaths came in. “Keep that shit on the battlefield,” he pleaded, before suspending his campaign and returning home to mourn the victims and meet with survivors.

Then he asked himself, “What is the most that we could possibly do?”

Gathered around his dinner table one day, he said he told a clutch of advisers, “I can’t escape the conclusion that if we want to stop selling these, then we should also buy the 10 million or more that are out there off the streets. I said, ‘Give me the best argument against this.’ And the only real argument against it was a political argument.”

Until the El Paso shooting, O’Rourke told me, “I never forced myself to answer the question, ‘If it’s important to stop selling these, then shouldn’t we do something to address the fact that there are those weapons of war out on the streets or in people’s homes that can and will be used against us?’ And I don’t know how to say it other than, ‘The reason I never asked myself that question is I just never entertained the possibility that it was possible.”

O’Rourke is now calling for a mandatory buyback for assault weapons and a voluntary buyback for handguns. The funding for the buybacks, he says, would come from increasing the excise tax on gun manufacturers and increasing fines on traffickers. People who do not sell back their assault weapons would be fined.

The proposal is similar to a policy advanced by one of his former competitors, California Congressman Eric Swalwell. Now it is O’Rourke arguing, as Swalwell did with less notice, that Democrats have approached gun control negotiations all wrong, by allowing gun rights activists to frame the parameters of the debate. At a recent campaign event, former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, an early O’Rourke supporter, told me, “I’m proud of the fearless way that my candidate is speaking the truth to people.” Swalwell said O’Rourke’s “Hell yes” answer “gave me goosebumps.” And David Axelrod, a former top adviser to President Barack Obama, said on Twitter that O’Rourke “is really moving on this issue of banning assault weapons. Very, very powerful.”

At his rallies, O’Rourke still swivels from impeachment and climate change to immigration and jobs. He is not a single-issue candidate. But it is on gun control that he is distinguishing himself. He told me he “can certainly tell from the way that people have responded and their passion around gun violence, that this has resonated, and that they associate me with this issue.”

During an early October town hall at Casa del Mexicano, a cultural center in Los Angeles’ Boyle Heights neighborhood, an elderly woman in the crowd winced when O’Rourke described the impact of an AR-15 or an AK-47, saying, “You talk to the surgeons who treat the victims, and they say it just shreds to shit everything inside of your body.” A high school student told O’Rourke that “all of my friends are scared” that they will be shot at school, and asked him, “What do we do?” O’Rourke, sweating through his shirt, his sleeves rolled up, told her, “We are not going to accept what is happening right now,” and he suggested that young people would alter the politics surrounding the issue. A cheer went up when he repeated his “Hell, yes,” refrain.

For the purposes of the election, an adviser to one of O’Rourke’s competitors told me, “He did the smart thing, which was to take the pure position.”

The adviser added, “I don’t know quite what it’s adding up to.”

***

For a Democratic presidential candidate,taking a stand on gun control would appear to be advantageous.

Bulletproof backpacks hit the market, active shooter drills have become commonplace in schools, and gun policy ranks among Democratic voters’ top concerns. Forty-five percent of Americans worry they or someone in their family will be victimized in a mass shooting, according to Gallup. In the midterm elections last year, Everytown for Gun Safety, the pro-gun control group founded by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, spent millions of dollars, and gun control advocates claimed a number of victories in congressional swing districts.

“The myth that gun safety is the ‘third rail’ of American politics, I think, is buried,” says John Feinblatt, Everytown’s president. “Candidates are now running on their gun safety credentials from Day 1. … That’s just a seismic shift.”

A Quinnipiac University poll released in August found that 60 percent of voters support a nationwide ban on the sale of assault weapons, and 82 percent favor requiring people to be licensed before purchasing a gun. Support for a mandatory assault weapon buyback program is more mixed—46 percent, according to Quinnipiac, or 52 percent according to aWashington Post-ABC News poll. But support for a mandatory buyback soars among Democratic voters, reaching 71 percent in the Quinnipiac poll. Even in Texas, 49 percent of the state’s voters support a mandatory buyback, according to a University of Texas, Tyler, poll released after the Houston debate.

O’Rourke, who frequently cites the Texas poll, told me, “That’s amazing. That’s without any money being spent to support that position. That’s without—with the exception of Eric Swalwell—without a single national political figure advocating for or endorsing the idea. So that’s just where people are.”

Senators Cory Booker and Kamala Harris have expressed support for a mandatory gun buyback, but the vast majority of the Democratic candidates have not. The field’s early front-runner, Vice President Joe Biden, came close to endorsing the idea over the summer, in a CNN interview, before his campaign clarified that Biden supports a voluntary—not a mandatory—buyback. He has since proposed giving people who own assault weapons or high-capacity magazines a choice: sell them back or register them.

Other candidates don’t just oppose buybacks; they also criticize O’Rourke for advocating one. At a gun control forum in Las Vegas in early October, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg said buybacks have had “mixed results” and questioned the utility of pursuing them.

“We’ve got to do something now,” Buttigieg said. “And we have a way sometimes as a party—my party—of getting caught just when we’ve amassed the discipline and the force to get something done right away, a shiny object makes it harder for us to focus.”

When O’Rourke appeared at the forum that same afternoon, he condemned Buttigieg’s rhetoric. To “those who are worried about the polls and want to triangulate or talk to the consultants or listen to the focus groups—and I’m thinking about Mayor Pete on this one, who I think probably wants to get to the right place but is afraid of doing the right thing right now—to those who need a weatherman, let me tell you that in this country, mandatory buybacks are supported by a majority of Americans,” he said.

O’Rourke told me, “I think that the political leadership, including Democrats, has not caught up to where the people are on this.”

The reaction to his “Hell, yes” moment underscores his point. Congressman David Cicilline of Rhode Island said on Fox News after the debate that O’Rourke’s “message doesn’t help,” while Senator Chris Coons of Delaware told CNN, “I frankly think that that clip will be played for years at Second Amendment rallies with organizations that try to scare people by saying Democrats are coming for your guns.”

“The issue that a lot of gun owners have is that they think Democrats want to take away their guns,” says Mathew Littman, a former Biden speechwriter who now supports Harris and works on gun reform. “So, saying that you want to take away their guns may prove that they’re right. And the problem with it is gun owners and non-gun owners agree on so many things that we could do—universal background checks, red-flag laws. Why don’t we start on the areas we agree upon?”

Sure enough, Republicans pounced on O’Rourke for his buyback plan. A GOP state representative in Texas tweeted, “My AR is ready for you Robert Francis,” while the state’s lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, rejoiced that O’Rourke “will never be a threat in Texas politics again.” John Thomas, a Republican strategist, told me he is using O’Rourke’s remarks to raise money for congressional races in New York, California and Michigan.

“Beto has fundamentally shifted the messaging on guns in the Democratic primary going forward,” Thomas says. “If you’re a second-tier candidate in the next debate, why wouldn’t you go even a step further than that? Say, ‘Yes, why stop there? We’ve got to do the sin tax on guns, tax ammunition and guns, and give the proceeds to gun victims.’”

O’Rourke could have expected blowback from the right, but he was incredulous at the Democratic criticism of his plan. After Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader with a long record on gun control, brushed aside mandatory buybacks, saying, “I don’t know of any other Democrat who agrees with Beto O’Rourke,” the candidate responded by telling reporters to “ask Chuck Schumer what he’s been able to get done.”

***

“Somebody told me—I don’t know if this is true—that the average attention span nationally on gun violence after a horrific mass shooting is three weeks,” O’Rourke said at our dinner in Pittsburgh. He said he does not sense that this time—not for the electorate and, he added, “Not for me.”

Yet it is possible that national attention has already moved past O’Rourke two months after the El Paso shooting and one month after the Houston debate. After the impeachment inquiry into Trump engulfed Washington, Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat who had been in talks with the White House on gun control, acknowledged that the turmoil “may temporarily be the end of the road for a lot of legislative initiatives,” including on guns. In the presidential campaign, the topic has reverted from its once-charged status to its usual, less prominent place among other priorities.

O’Rourke, like many congressional observers, was never optimistic for negotiations with Trump on gun control. Long before Democrats opened their impeachment inquiry, the Republican president spurned a universal background checks bill passed by the House. Talks between Democrats and the White House, O’Rourke said, “never seemed on.”

O’Rourke’s own proposal has been criticized as politically impractical or potentially unconstitutional. When CNN’s Chris Cuomo told O’Rourke last month that he doubted the legality of mandatory buybacks, O’Rourke replied that under the Second Amendment, “the government does have a power to regulate those kinds of weapons that are extraordinarily unusual or deadly.” He told Cuomo he is “willing to fight that one all the way to the end.”

The measure O’Rourke is proposing, he says, is not unlike laws banning any other illegal weapon or substance. “We don’t go door to door to enforce any part of the criminal code,” he told me, “nor would we in this case.” When asked whether penalties could include imprisonment, he said, “A fine, certainly. I don’t know about imprisonment. But it’s something that I’d like to listen to.”

In its uncertainty—surrounding the specifics of the legislation that O’Rourke would support, as well as its prospect of passage—O’Rourke’s proposal is not unlike plans advanced by Democrats on any number of issues, including health care and climate change. And politicians of both parties have long found political value in advancing agendas that are not immediately likely to pass.

Although O’Rourke’s buybacks proposal has had little effect on his campaign’s weak polling, it has allowed him to “put a mark in the book on something relevant,” says Doug Herman, a Democratic strategist. “It takes him out of the abyss and puts him on the trampoline to another office.”

O’Rourke, for now, rejects that possibility. When I pressed at our dinner in Pittsburgh whether any other political office might appeal to him—if not a run for Senate, which he has consistently resisted, perhaps Texas governor, even mayor of El Paso—O’Rourke said no. “I can’t tell you all the reasons why,” he said. “I just can’t even imagine.”

“No,” he said. “I’m running for president.”

If he doesn’t win the presidency, O’Rourke said that “in whatever way I can contribute, I’m going to do that.”

He recalled Lonnie Phillips telling him in Denver that if O’Rourke stopped talking about gun control, he would be “pissed,” and Sean Whalen, a pediatric dentist whose patient was shot to death last year, warning him that “if you lose this election or you don’t get the nomination, if you walk away from this, I would be personally offended.”

O’Rourke told me, “I’m in this for the long haul.”

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[joebookish-blog]

Ladder Dream

Rewritten for podcast - 3/27/17

As I walked through the ICU, family told me that my dad hadn’t opened his eyes for a week. Nurses said he’d need a tracheostomy, he might not survive the surgery, and at best he’d spend the rest of his life in bed.  That night, the night my dad died, I held his hand for six hours and talked to him the entire time. He was incapable of responding; his lungs didn’t work and the rest of his organs were failing. They’d pumped him full of opiates to keep him from reflexively pulling on his respirator tube.

Before my dad’s hospitalization, my sister and I hadn’t seen him in over a year. While he was around, he’d developed a gambling problem that put a lot of pressure on me to provide for the three of us. My sister is much younger than I and wasn’t yet capable of helping out, so I worked and gave all my money to him for a while.  It wasn’t anywhere near enough to support us and he still spent most of that on scratch-off lottery tickets. My money drained, we didn’t have food, and our power was cut off every month. Eventually, I convinced him to move to his hometown more than 500 miles away so he could work and follow his passion for singing. At 77 years old, I never thought he stood much of a chance at success, but I kept that to myself so he’d give my sister and me the opportunity to eat regularly and live in a place with lights that worked most of the time.

Once he moved away, we kept in regular contact, spoke every other day at least, and I stressed my sister’s way through high school. I worked full time, came home, cooked, helped her with homework, and read until falling asleep in the La-Z-Boy left from our parents’ house. My sister got my old bed. With the combined income of my twelve dollar an hour job and the survivors’ benefits we received for outliving our mother, we lived in a two-bedroom apartment that I could barely afford. My dad always told us he was okay and I always promised we’d go up to see him as soon as possible. He said that we shouldn’t, he had no room and there was nothing to see. I never saw where he lived, but it was a two room apartment that he’d built for himself in the middle of the nowhere. I don’t know that it had running water, but it didn’t have air conditioning. When he’d lived with us, he drank coffee almost exclusively and sometimes chain-smoked; as far as I know, those habits only got worse out there. He had one friend, the son of the man on whose land my father lived. Together they’d worked to build some sort of community center with a dance hall, though I don’t think anything ever materialized.

One night, my father called us. He coughed very weakly and I knew something was wrong. After the call, I told my sister that dad sounded very sick and he might not be okay this time. A few weeks later, my uncle called, told me that my father’d been hospitalized. I told him we’d head to El Paso. My dad could still speak and when he had the chance, he called us. As always, he assured us that he was okay, not to worry. When we arrived at the hospital three days later, I discovered that my father had had an emergency heart surgery. I left my sister in a waiting room with family and went in to visit; Dad was delirious from the pain killers. He saw me walk up with the doctor, seemed relieved. I snaked my arm through the tubes that surrounded him and gave him a hug, kissed his head. He asked me to help him sit up. The doctor stood on the opposite side of the bed and tried to assist. Dad grimaced as the doctor leaned in, saying “ow, ow, ow,” calling the doctor a motherfucker before any physical contact was ever made between them. The doctor pulled back, I apologized to him, and I sat my dad up. I told him I loved him and held his hand while my dad’s brothers and nephews stood nearby telling childhood stories about living in a Texas barrio. I brought my sister in and my dad said, “Hi Moe,” which was a nickname he’d adopted for her from her friends. We promised to be back soon and left.

I had one more phone conversation with my dad. He sounded better. I honestly believed he’d be okay, that he’d pulled through the worst of it. I told him I loved him, told him I wished he’d taken care of himself, told him we’d be up there as quickly as possible and I passed the phone to my sister. I remember her saying she was okay, that she loved him and missed him. After they hung up, she cried because she’d ignored his last call before all this began. I told her it was okay, we didn’t know any of this was going to happen. We visited once more before I signed the paperwork to terminate life-support. They’d said my dad had low odds of surviving, but they were going to try one more operation, this one on his kidneys or liver. That was when he’d stopped opening his eyes.

Then on that last night, while walking up to the bed, everyone telling me that my dad was basically dead, I locked eyes with him. Of course, he was looking right at me when I got to his bedside.  His eyes were hazy, but defiant as ever. I greeted him, told him I’d brought my sister and that the cousin we were staying with had taken good care of us. He reacted to what I said, squeezed my hand. I let him know they wanted to do a tracheostomy.  His eyebrows called them motherfuckers, and I told him all the things they’d said about him spending the rest of his life on machines. I think they had him on codeine, his eyes rolled slowly wherever he looked, and I told him that I’d sign the paperwork to terminate life support; he’d live if his lungs would work. He looked confused and wary, but I assumed this was what he’d want; we’d always talked about needing to live without machines. I signed the paperwork.

That is second biggest mistake of my life my life, getting him to leave home was the first.

I held his hand, which was swollen because of the organ failure, and I told him I loved him. They removed the tube and he started gasping. I hoped this meant his lungs were working, but he just kept gasping as though he were drowning. It went on, progressively lighter, for six hours. He looked calm and I cried, telling him I loved him, asking him to go to heaven and fix up the house we’d abandoned, that my sister and I would see him later on. I’m not religious, but he was Catholic, and I thought it was something he’d want to hear. I felt guilty as I said it, but I said it anyway because it might mean something to him. I told him I’d take care of my sister always, not to worry about me and her, told him he’d made us strong, asked him why he’d done the things he did, asked him why he hadn’t taken care of himself, told him to fix up the house, that we’d see him again and we’d all live there with no bills to worry about. People filtered in and out, my sister came in and hugged and kissed him. The loss in his face was the worst when she came into his field of vision. He cried and his breaths were further and further apart, then grew shorter and more rapid and eventually I couldn’t hear them anymore. I let his hand go when his eyes emptied. I went to the restroom and took a walk to a nearby gas station, bought Chapstick and told the guy behind the counter that my dad had just died. I called a family friend and let her know.

His funeral came and went and my sister and I returned home and moved in with an aunt who took care of us through my sister’s senior year. After my sister started college and I got my own place again, I had a dream that I broke into my parents’ old house. I walked through its long central hallway, saw the ceilings collapsing and black mold everywhere, paperwork scattered across the floors. I saw the cot my dad slept on next to an air purifier I’d given him; the home’s decay started while he’d still lived there alone, sometimes without power, later on without water. I walked through our living room, kitchen, TV room, his bedroom, my sister’s room, and came to my old part of the house, which, through the doorway, I could see was bright and restored. I entered and my dad was on a ladder, alive, painting one of the walls. He asked how we were doing, I told him my sister had started college and that I got my own place, told him he should move back in with me, that I could support him and that I wanted him around, that I wanted to make sure he was healthy. He said no, that he was okay where he was. I told him my sister would love to see him, that we could all get a place together if he wanted, that maybe we could get the old place back and make it work, that he’d need to get a job but we could do it. He said that he couldn’t. I tried for a while longer and eventually, in his certain, knowing, sarcastic way, he said, “it’s a little late for that,” and I woke up. I think about him every day. I see him in my face and my actions, and in the actions of my sister too. I think of him when I’m being careless and I think of him when all of my flaws come together and make things work that way he could. My sister still cries for him, I think we both try to avoid fixating on the negative aspects of all of it, but sometimes it’s impossible, there was too much sadness. We embrace what we can and laugh about his jokes and his personality.

We miss him.

[thisdaynews]

F-Bombs Away!

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/f-bombs-away/

F-Bombs Away!

The surprise attack on Hawaii came on a quiet Sunday morning, and it fell to the president of the United States to rally a confused and stricken nation one day later in a momentous address to Congress:

“Yesterday, Dec. 7, 1941—a date which will live as totally fucked up—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by the naval and air forces of Japan.”

Story Continued Below

That’s the power of language at work. And who can forget the image of an American commander in chief in Berlin on the front lines of the Cold War: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this fucking wall.”

Let’s be mature about this. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan both surely dropped a choice word or two in private, even on solemn subjects like Pearl Harbor and Soviet tyranny. Democrat Beto O’Rourke, meanwhile, has not actually signaled that he will make the F-bomb a central part of his rhetorical arsenal in the unlikely event he becomes the next president.

He is, however, apparently hoping that vulgarity will be an engine of his political revival in the Democratic presidential contest. In doing so, he is part of a confluence of factors serving to mainstream what once counted as the most forbidden entry in the roster of four-letter words.

Notice to reader: The examples above are just two of 14 profanities in this story. Editors decided to skip the coy dashes and asterisks and more straightforward [expletive deleteds]. How else to handle it when a candidate for president infuses a policy statement after a horrific mass shooting with the phrase, “This is fucked up”?

On social media and in interviews, O’Rourke’s profanity has proved to be something of a political Rorschach test.

Pro: He has found a searing and even eloquent way of cutting through the madness and violence of the age. The real obscenity, by these lights, is routine mass shootings and the paralytic response they engender from the governing class, to which O’Rourke’s incredulity is a powerfully authentic rejoinder.

Con: O’Rourke’s profanity is risible, a perfect summary of a campaign that even before was mocked for its alleged preening and Wayne’s World affect. Even if the first time he dropped the F-bomb came as a genuine outburst, his repetition on Twitter and now official campaign T-shirts reveals calculation and contrivance—making his vulgarities the opposite of the authenticity they supposedly convey.

Either way, the Texan’s coarse language is a frivolous dimension of a serious question for Democrats: Should progressive leaders confront the rawness and norm-shattering nature of President Donald Trump’s political style with something similar? Or should they stand for a return to standards that used to be assumed for any presidential contender—including language reflecting the gravity of the office, or at a minimum was G-rated?

Before O’Rourke, the public figure who arguably was most notorious for his prolific use of the F-word was Rahm Emanuel, who kept the salty parlance of a political operative even as he became a member of Congress, White House chief of staff, and mayor of Chicago.

Emanuel, who calls himself “a reformed swearer,” acknowledged in an interview, “I’ve got this notorious reputation and I’m not saying that I don’t swear but you’ve never heard me publicly swear. … I actually don’t think it’s the right thing to do.”

“I think people are being exhausted by vulgarity and I think [the candidates] should be engaging people on the future” through the power of ideas, Emanuel explained.

But some other Obama White House veterans were more tolerant of O’Rourke’s rhetorical excesses.

“It’s good for him to show a little emotion and get angry so that people can see exactly where he stands and that he will fight for what he believes in,” said Stephanie Cutter, Obama’s former 2012 deputy campaign manager and cofounder of Precision Strategies.

“Most candidates do talk like this and they talk like this to their teams and at the bar with reporters, and they get credit for being real people and not engaged in some veneer,” said former Obama press operative Ben LaBolt. “Beto has used it to demonstrate outrage about some really outrageous issues that the United States should have been able to solve many years ago, and so his approach would distinguish himself from somebody who would serve in the Senate and say ‘my dear friend’ and ‘my dear colleague.’”

By so frequently crossing a line that once might have been career-ending, O’Rourke is partly changing the political culture, and partly reflecting changes that are already underway.

As far back as September 2014, Trump tweeted: “Every time I speak of the haters and losers I do so with great love and affection. They can not help the fact that they were born fucked up!” More recently, in late March of this year, Trump told a campaign rally that Democrats should stop “defrauding the public with ridiculous bullshit.”

In June 2017, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who recently ended her presidential campaign, tried to stir a conference on technology and democracy by imploring, “If we are not helping people, we should go the fuck home.”

At the start of the year, newly elected Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib made a splash by saying of Trump, “We’re gonna impeach the motherfucker.”

Another newly elected member of Congress, Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, was recently quoted by The Cut noting the annoyance of being asked as a female candidate about her “self-care” on the campaign trail: “I’m like, ‘I don’t have fucking self-care! I’m running for Congress.’”

But O’Rourke is the one who has made the word his signature. After making his Texas Senate race surprisingly competitive, before narrowly losing, in 2018, O’Rourke went viral with his concession speech in which he praised supporters, “I’m so fucking proud of you guys.”

When he began his bid for president, O’Rourke was scolded at a campaign stop by a voter who urged him to “clean up his act” and not use profanity in ways were children will hear it. “Point taken, and very strongly made,” O’Rourke replied, promising to “keep it clean.”

But last month, meeting with reporters after the mass shooting in his hometown of El Paso, O’Rourke seemed impatient with what he regarded as the naivete of some questions about Trump’s role in inciting violence. “Members of the press, what the fuck?!” he exclaimed.

There are two facts about the F-word that most people learn early in their teenage years: The reaction it gets depends on context, and its shock value tends to diminish rapidly. O’Rourke’s initial uses of the word did seem a little like a young person at a family dinner:Wonder how the table will respond?

On balance, O’Rourke seems pleased with the reaction, at least among the people he cares most about. After new shootings in Texas, he went on CNN last Sunday morning to say: “We’re averaging about 300 mass shootings a year. No other country comes close. So, yes, this is fucked up.” He also defended his swearing by saying that it was “just honest” and important “to shock the conscience of this country.”

O’Rourke’s campaign also noted that all of the proceeds for his profane T-shirt go to March for Our Lives and Moms Demand.

Brit Hume, the prominent Fox News journalist, commented on Twitter, “As if his sewermouth will somehow give his argument more power.”

But Matt Bennett, a Democratic strategist unaffiliated with any presidential campaign and long-time gun control advocate, believes O’Rourke was rightly trying to shake people and signal that conventional politics isn’t adequate in the context of recurring mass murders.

“I think he’s decided that profanity can help him add emphasis where other language fails,” said Bennett. “Indeed, how else does one underscore their anger with, frustration at, and contempt for public officials who fail to act in the face of such horror? We all have been railing about this for years (decades in my case). How else do we signal that this situation is singularly obscene?”

George Lakoff, a retired Berkeley linguist who has written extensively on how Democrats sometimes lose political arguments by not effectively employing the power of language, was uncertain on the wisdom of O’Rourke’s shattering of old proprieties. “It’s basically saying: This is really important. Pay attention.”

O’Rourke may have grabbed attention, but it’s not clear how long he will keep it, at least based on the power of profanity. Forty-five years ago, the country was shocked by the prodigious use of Oval Office profanity—often as part of contemptuous and vindictive rants against opponents—by Richard Nixon and his aides when the White House tapes were released. The news media, reflecting the standards of the time, didn’t print the words but replaced them with “[expletive deleted].” Anticipating Tlaib by several decades, protesters outside the White House gates carried placards saying “Impeach the expletive deleted!”

But a generation that currently has made a star of Lana Del Ray and her album “Norman Fucking Rockwell” with its hit song “Fuck It, I Love you” isn’t likely to stay shocked, or perhaps even interested, for very long by O’Rourke’s language.

Back in 2004, when then-Vice President Dick Cheney told Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy to “Go fuck yourself” on the floor of the Senate, many news organizations debated internally about how to report the obviously newsworthy exchange—since it involved words that were forbidden by their editorial standards.

Those qualms seem irrelevant in the current climate.

Veteran reporter Nicholas Lemann, a former dean of Columbia University’s school of journalism, said these days, as politics grows more openly coarse, the news media should have no compunction about just reporting exactly what public figures say. The old notion of news organizations as a kind of unifying public square, in which editors had to primly enforce rules to ensure that the most sensitive people in the audience weren’t offended, has gone by the wayside now that every online reader is essentially his or her own editor.

“If they said it, you should quote it,” Lemann advises.

Another journalist, James Fallows, also served as a stint as a speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, who he recalled sometimes swore in private but very rarely.

He sees O’Rourke’s language as a sign of the times.

“As an old guy,” said Fallows, who last month turned 70, “I’ll avoid any decline in civilization, but I guess until recently public figures felt that they had to observe a public-private barrier. … Politicians have always been earthy people, but we are seeing the time, at least for the moment, the earthiness membrane is being pierced or is permeable.”

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[joebookish-blog]

Ladder Dream

9/6/2014

The night my dad died, I held his hand for six hours and talked to him the entire time. He was incapable of responding; his lungs didn’t work and the rest of his organs were failing. They’d pumped him full of opiates to keep him from reflexively pulling on his respirator tube. Outside the ICU, family told me he hadn’t opened his eyes for a week. As I approached him, nurses said he’d need a tracheotomy, he might not survive the surgery, and at best he’d spend the rest of his life in bed.

Before my dad’s hospitalization, my sister and I hadn’t seen him in over a year. While he was around, he’d developed a gambling problem that put a lot of pressure on me to provide for the three of us. My sister is much younger than I and, frankly, I don’t think it was her place to help. So I worked and gave him all my money for a while, it wasn’t anywhere near enough to support us and he still spent most of that on scratch offs. My money drained, we didn’t have food, and our power was cut off every month. Eventually, I convinced him to move to his hometown more than 500 miles away so he could work and follow his passion for singing. At 77 years old, I never thought he stood much of a chance to succeed, but I kept that to myself so he’d give my sister and I the opportunity to eat regularly and live in a place with lights that worked most of the time.

Once he moved away, we kept in regular contact, spoke every other day at least, and I stressed my sister’s way through high school. I worked full time, came home, cooked, helped her with homework, and read until falling asleep in the La-Z-Boy left from our parents’ old house. My sister got my old bed. With the combined income of my twelve dollar an hour job and the survivors’ benefits we received for outliving our mother, we lived in a two-bedroom apartment that I could barely afford. My dad always told us he was okay and I always promised we’d go up to see him as soon as possible. He said that we shouldn’t, he had no room and there was nothing to see. I never saw where he lived, but it was a two room apartment that he’d built himself in the middle of the nowhere. I don’t know that it had running water, but it didn’t have air conditioning. When he’d lived with us, he drank coffee almost exclusively and sometimes chain-smoked; as far as I know, those habits only got worse out there. He had one friend, the son of the man on whose land my father lived. Together they’d worked to build some sort of community center with a dance hall, though I don’t think anything ever materialized.

One night, my father called us. He coughed very weakly and I knew something was wrong. After the call, I told my sister that dad sounded sick andhe might not make it this time. A few weeks later, my uncle called, told me that my father’d been hospitalized. I told him we’d head to El Paso. My dad could still speak and when he had the chance, he called us. As always, he assured us that he was okay, not to worry. When we arrived at the hospital three days later, I discovered that my father had had an emergency heart surgery. I left my sister in a waiting room with family and went in to visit; Dad was delirious from the pain killers. He saw me walk up with the doctor, seemed relieved. I snaked my arm through the tubes that surrounded him and gave him a hug, kissed his head. He asked me to help him sit up. The doctor stood on the opposite side of the bed and tried to assist. Dad grimaced as the doctor leaned in, saying “ow, ow, ow,” and called the doctor a motherfucker before any physical contact was ever made. The doctor pulled back, I apologized to him, and I sat my dad up. I told him I loved him and held his hand while my dad’s brothers and nephews stood nearby telling childhood stories about living in a Texas barrio. I brought my sister in and my dad said, “Hi Moe,” which was a nickname he’d adopted for her from her friends. We promised to be back soon and left. I had one more phone conversation with my dad. He sounded better. I honestly believed he’d be okay, that he’d pulled through the worst of it. I told him I loved him, told him I wished he’d taken care of himself, told him we’d be up there as quickly as possible and I passed the phone to my sister. I remember her saying she was okay, that she loved him and missed him. After they hung up, she cried because she’d ignored his last call before all this began. I told her it was okay, we didn’t know any of this was going to happen. We visited once more before I signed the paperwork to terminate life-support. They’d said my dad had low odds for surviving, but they were going to try one more operation, this one on his kidneys or liver. Afterward, he hadn’t opened his eyes. Of course, he was looking right at me when I got to his bedside, eyes hazy, though defiant as ever. I greeted him, told him I’d brought my sister and that my cousin had taken good care of us. He reacted to what I said, squeezed my hand. I let him know they wanted to do a tracheotomy, his eyebrows called them motherfuckers, and I told him all the things they’d said about him spending the rest of his life on machines. I think they had him on codeine, his eyes rolled slowly wherever he looked, and I told him that I’d sign the paperwork to terminate life support, that he’d live if his lungs would work. He looked confused and wary, but I assumed this was what he’d want; we’d always talked about needing to live without machines. I signed the paperwork. This is second biggest mistake of my life my life, letting him leave home was the first. I held his hand, which was swollen because of the organ failure, and I told him I loved him. They removed the tube and he started gasping. I hoped this meant his lungs were working, but he just kept gasping as though he was drowning. It went on, progressively lighter, for six hours. He looked calm and I cried, telling him I loved him, asking him to go to heaven and fix up the house we’d abandoned, that my sister and I would see him later on. I’m an atheist, but he was Catholic, and I thought it was something he’d want to hear. I felt guilty as I said it, but I said it anyway because it might mean something to him. I told him I’d take care of my sister always, not to worry about me and her, told him he’d made us strong, asked him why he’d done the things he did, asked him why he hadn’t taken care of himself, told him to fix up the house, that we’d see him again and we’d all live there with no bills to worry about. People filtered in and out, my sister came in and hugged and kissed him. His expression was one of loss when she came into his field of vision. He cried and his breaths were further and further apart, then grew shorter and more rapid and eventually I couldn’t hear them anymore. I let his hand go when his eyes emptied. I went to the restroom and took a walk to a nearby gas station, bought Chapstick and told the guy behind the counter that my dad had just died. I called a family friend and let her know. His funeral came and went, my sister and I returned home, moved in with an aunt for my sister’s senior year. After my sister started college and I got my own place again, I had a dream that I broke into my parents’ old house. I walked through its long central corridor, saw the ceilings collapsing and black mold everywhere, paperwork scattered across the floor. I saw the cot my dad slept on next to an air purifier I’d given him; the home’s decay started while he’d still lived there alone, sometimes without power, later on without water. I walked through our living room, kitchen, TV room, his bedroom, my sister’s room, and came to my old part of the house, which, through the doorway, I could see was bright and restored. I entered and my dad was on a ladder, alive, painting one of the walls. He asked how we were doing, I told him my sister had started college and that I got my own place, told him he should move back in with me, that I could support him and that I wanted him around, that I wanted to make sure he was healthy. He said no, that he was okay where he was. I told him my sister would love to see him, that we could all get a place together if he wanted, that maybe we could get the old place back and make it work, that he’d need to get a job but we could do it. He said that he couldn’t. I tried for a while longer and eventually, in his certain, knowing, sarcastic way, he said, “it’s a little late for that,” and I woke up. I think about him every day. I see him in my face and in the actions of my sister and I. I think of him when I’m being careless and I think of him when all of my flaws come together and make things work the way he could. My sister still cries for him, I think we both try to avoid fixating on the negative aspects of all of it, but sometimes it’s impossible, there was too much sadness. We embrace what we can and laugh about his jokes and his personality. We miss him.