Ruminations

How many of you know his address by heart and can sing it to the tune we heard as students in the 90s?

Write Scruff
McGruff
Chicago Illinois
Six oh six five twooooooo

I wrote him when I was in grade school, and in return I received a packet of merch and a letter. I thought it was very cool and I think about that package with happiness. Of course, not every kid in my class thought that Scruff was hip. Many of them rolled their eyes or exhaled loudly whenever we were watching one of his videos in class. These were often the troubled students, the students that were most likely doing drugs themselves, and the ones living in broken homes. As an adult it makes me think that there were very clearly noticeable warning signs that something was wrong with them.

Despite lacking universal appeal, his lessons always stuck with me. I never once did an illegal drug, and although I drank heavily in college and in young adulthood, I haven’t been a regular drinker in years, and it’s been a month since my last drink. I hope to quit for good.

What’s interesting now is that even though I took Scruff’s lessons to heart about saying no to drugs, I didn’t learn exactly who I would have to be saying no to. When push came to shove, it wasn’t a sketchy criminal in an alleyway, but a US President, a well-dressed pharmaceutical executive, and his minion in a white lab coat.

The pushers may look very different than the ones portrayed in the 90s, but the lessons learned and the tactics used remain the same. The peer pressure that they employed was overwhelming, and it was essential to learn to live with being unpopular, marginalized, excluded, shunned, sanctioned, and even persecuted. I’m glad that at a young age, I learned that these would be possibilities, and at a young age, I made the decision to accept them.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I think that when I told the Federal Government that under no circumstances would I take their pharmaceutical poison, I spoke with the voice of a gruff bloodhound in a trench coat.

Just say no.

(Originally posted on Twitter June 19, 2023).

In September of 2019 before the madness started, I took a trip to New York for a concert. I flew in because I wanted to take a helicopter from the airport to Manhattan where I was staying, but for whatever reason the app I used at the time (I think it was Uber) didn’t have the option available that day. So I took a cab. The trip itself wasn’t that great. I ended up having to leave the show early because I stood in line so long that my poor back couldn’t hold out anymore, and I cut my hand pretty badly on the rock shield of a car I was exiting on a trip out to Queens for some tamales. Basically the stay in New York was not that memorable or pleasurable.

However, the thing that I truly enjoyed about this trip and the thing that I will always remember is the journey leaving New York because I decided to try the train for the first time. I boarded an Amtrak and took a ride from Manhattan to DC and it was an unbelievably enjoyable experience. I basically decided at this point that I would try to take the train whenever available and that I would never fly again.

I took this picture of the sunset somewhere in Maryland (I believe it was the Elk River). I look at this picture and am glad that the train runs in some places, America for all of its faults has such incredible natural beauty.

I’m thinking about this today because as much as I oppose him, and think the worst of him, and have suffered under his regime, and have witnessed everything continue to deteriorate under his reign (including race relations being that it’s Juneteenth), the one redeeming quality that Joe Biden had was that he was a train guy. He was Amtrak’s champion when he was Senator, and when he became President, he could have really advocated for it.

He had a golden opportunity with the infrastructure bill to pour an unprecedented sum of money into the rail infrastructure of this country and really get trains to be a fantastic mode of transportation here in the US. Instead he handed the money over to an Alfred E. Neuman-esque charlatan whose only accomplishments appear to be serving as Mayor and being completely absent during one of the worst transportation and environmental catastrophes in US history.

It’s such a shame that this awful President completely squandered the one cause that could have united the country and been a Great Works Project that would have left a legacy and served future Americans incredibly well. Instead he has doubled down on social deviance and persecuting his political enemies in front of red soaked backgrounds surrounded by soldiers, a Maladroit Mussolini, stuttering and guffawing his way through his mean-spirited soliloquies, all the while the infrastructure around the US continues to rot. We could have had trains that served all Americans and ran on time, instead we got citizens who were basically subjected to chemical attacks.

Maybe he has more in common with Benito than we thought.