marriage

2022 in Review: No Thanks

~ Randy Blazak ~ Leave a comment

December 31, 2022

I knew this year was going to be hard, but it was a real test on all of us. From mass shootings in Buffalo, Ulavde, and over 600 others, to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February, there was death all around us. Throw in the carnage from the accelerating climate crisis and it felt like we were in last days of humanity. If it weren’t for the sizable wins by Democrats and the World Cup performance of Lionel Messi, the year might have been a complete write off.

The lowlight of 2022 was American women losing their right to choose but the highlight of the year was the hearings of January 6th Committee that deftly presented the case to the American people that Donald Trump employed multiple tactics to overthrow American democracy. It was must-see TV and we can only hope 2023 gives us indictments for the orange traitor and his inner circle of enablers. Watching him flail after his November 16 campaign announcement has bordered on high comedy. (Do you know anyone who has bought his “collectable” NFTs? I don’t.) Maybe he and Elon Musk can compete over who has the lamest social media platform.

All that informed my own year, which included heading to Ukraine to help resettle refugees, spending a day at Auschwitz, working on a federal DHS grant to find ways to interrupt extremist violence, and talking to the media about the rising threat of Kanye West. It was a great distraction from my personal life which I struggled to make sense of my domestic circumstance. I started the year in the depths of despair and I’m ending it with a healthy dose of “I don’t care.” A great somatic therapist allowed me to connect the dots from my childhood abuse to the problematic patterns in my history and finally take agency in my life. I know I’ll be fine.

The thread through this all has been the complete joy of watching my daughter move from being a silly second grader to a chess playing third grader (still pretty silly). Her growth as a person has been both challenging and inspiring. Particularly interesting has been watching her negotiate the encroaching gender norms and fairly successfully smashing them. Gen Z will have its own relationship with patriarchy, but it’s not your mother’s Riot Grrrl feminism.

I didn’t blog much in 2022. I got 26 posts out, mostly about my trip to Ukraine, which I am still processing. The posts about my separation reflect how hard I was working to fix things, but it takes two to tango and I’m starting to think I should find a better person to dance with. When I hosted poetry readings in Atlanta, I used to make fun of middle-agers who read poems about their divorces. I’m not going to be that guy. Besides, 2023 has much to offer. There will be baseball and birthdays (Disney turns 100). Russia getting the hell out of Ukraine and maybe the last Daylights Savings ever. Great music I don’t even know about yet. I have tickets to Springsteen’s February 25th show in Portland. (But who will I take?) And maybe I will blog about the Trump family in custody. Who knows?

I’m ending the year on a melancholy note but there has been immense joy in 2022 between the crushing moments of sadness. We can use the year push us to keep our children safer and our democracy stronger.

2022 WTW Posts

I Became a Teacher Because of Sydney Poitier (January 15, 2022)

Represent! Why We Need a Black Woman on the Supreme Court (January 30, 2022)

La Historia de Cómo Encontré mi Corazón (para el Día de San Valentín) (February 13, 2022)

My last hours of 57, when I grew up. (February 19, 2022)

In the Toilet Paper Tube of History: Watching the Battle for Ukraine in Real Time (February 27, 2022)

Psychoanalyzing the Attraction to Chaos, or Why I Want to Go to Ukraine (March 13, 2022)

On the Polish Border with Ukraine: Watching the World Change from Up Close (March 25, 2022)

The First Two Days on the Polish-Ukraine Border, as Bombs Fall on Lviv (March 26, 2022)

One Night in Lviv (Makes a Hard Man Humble) (March 28, 2022)

Panic in Auschwitz: Putting the Present Moment in Context (April 2, 2022)

Where I’ve Been, What I’ve Seen, Who I Am: A Brief Reflection of My Time in Ukraine/Poland (April 6, 2022)

The Rescue of the Girl in the Red Coat: Gratitude for One Ukrainian Dad (April 17, 2022)

Seriously, What’s Wrong with Men? Lighting Fires in Post-Roe America (May 12, 2022)

It’s All Too Much: You Don’t Want to Arm This Teacher at the Moment (June 6, 2022)

Talking to My 7-year-old Daughter About Abortion (June 25, 2022)

My Jim Crow Marriage: MAGA Co-dependency (July 21, 2022)

Gender – Nature vs Nurture 8: The Looking Glass Self (August 7, 2022)

To Escalate or De-escalate, That is the Question (August 23, 2022)

“Where did my friends go?” Wives as Unpaid Therapists (September 14, 2022)

The Catch-22 of Trump 2024, or, How Donald Trump’s Comical Death is Democracy’s Great Hope  (September 19, 2022)

Sept. 26, 2012: My 10-year Reconstruction Begins (September 26, 2022)

Ukraine Days: Reflections During a DakhaBrakha concert (October 1, 2022)

The Complexity of the Game: Making Sense of the World Series (October 28, 2022)

I Was a Third Grader (November 15, 2022)

Foreshadowing Fascism: The Spike in Anti-Semitism is Bigger than Trump and Kanye (December 7, 2022)

Dad’s Top Discs of 2022 (December 14, 2022)

A Room for Andi: Creating Space in the House of Patriarchy (December 25, 2022)

2022 in Review: No Thanks (December 31, 2022)

A Room for Andi: Creating Space in the House of Patriarchy

~ Randy Blazak ~ 2 Comments

December 25, 2022

Christmas Eve

It was a challenge to come up with the right Christmas present last year for my wife, Andi. We were a month into our separation and I definitely couldn’t half-ass it. Half-assing it through the marriage is what got me in this horrible situation. I got her a LSAT study book (which she used) and a trip to Paris (which she didn’t use). So, a year later, I really wanted to show up. It was time to center her instead of my idea of her. We’re back under the same roof, but still separated. I want her to know I’ve learned something this year.

There are always “things” we want. (If I don’t get The Beatles Get Back DVD from Santa, I’m buying it myself.) But things are transitory. They matter and then they don’t. What if there was a gift that was both lasting and reflected a partner who pays attention? A gift that recognizes the personhood of the recipient, not just their role as a gift receiver.

One of the great works I read in grad school was Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929). If the home is a metaphor for society, it’s the man’s house. Rooms for women are assigned specific gendered tasks; the kitchen, the laundry room, the nursery, the sewing room. Men get their den to just exist in. What is women’s equivalent of the man cave? Woolf argued if women are to write fiction, they need a room of their own. If they want to live outside the constraints of their proscribed roles, they must have a safe space inside their own homes to explore their options. Like men do every day.

I bought my house in 1999 and turned every room into my own. That included a room for my vinyl collection and a separate room for my CDs. When Andi moved in in 2013, we had to shoehorn her life into my space. My closet for her clothes. My kitchen drawers for her pans. My walls for her paintings. She was a lodger in Randyland. How could she ever feel like she truly belonged here?

So that could be my gift; a room of her own. Andi plans on going to law school in the fall and will need a study space, or just a “be” space. My CD room was upstairs with big east-facing windows. It was the perfect candidate to be de-Randified and transformed into a comfy study. I had to build shelves in another room to store my thousands of CD. It had to be all her room, no Blazak artifacts. Since it was upstairs, I could work on in while she was at work or “out,” without her knowing what I was up to.

So I got to work, painting, fixing cracks in the wall, finding a desk and a comfy reading chair, and framing the book cover of Woolf’s classic for the wall. Cozy helped too, contributing a plant and a framed picture of her and her mother. Oh, and a white furry rug she found at IKEA. A bottle of mescal and a note in the desk and the job was done. I purposely under-decorated. It would defeat the entire idea if I filled her room with my ideas. She can create the space in her image.

I wrapped a copy of A Room of One’s Own (sans cover) after inscribing in it, “The rest of this gift is upstairs,” and placed it under the tree. I put Cozy to bed (after watching Home Alone) and hoped she’d be home in time to open presents in the morning.

Christmas Morning

Like Santa, Andi arrived in the wee hours and we opened presents. Cozy was most excited about the Minecraft Lego set. (Mr. Claus went through the ringer for that one.) Andi’s present for me was a Joni Mitchell biography. The last gift was her Woolf book and then Cozy and I led her upstairs to see the room I’ve been working on for several weeks.

I think she liked it. “It’s probably the most thoughtful gift you’ve ever given me,” she said. I want her to have her space in this male owned house. I want her to want to stay.

OK, now I have to go get my Beatles DVD.

“Where did my friends go?” Wives as Unpaid Therapists

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

September 14, 2022

Masculinity is a truly fragile thing. In our youth, we are hit over the head with the message pushing male bonding. No girls allowed in the treehouse. There are plenty of negatives associated associated with that, including that it devalues all things female and blocks girls and women out of the avenues of power (“Bros before hos!”), but there is an unintended benefit to all the bro-time.

Men aren’t supposed to talk about their feelings and that’s what gets us into trouble. “When boys cry, they cry bullets,” I remember a child psychologist saying on The Oprah Winfrey Show after the 1999 Columbine shooting. But when we do manage to share a bit of vulnerability, it tends to be with our bros, maybe after a few beers or a lost match. We learn that we can lean on our male friends without being called a “cry baby” because they are looking for the same thing. Then after opening up, we have to “cowboy up” and revert to the same stoic bullshit.

So what happens when we get married?

The story goes that marriage means leaving our male friends behind on the playground, soccer pitch, or tavern. Male friends celebrate the interest of a single man and now he must trade his dudes in for a woman. John Lennon had to leave the Beatles for Yoko and her screaming. And now the wife is the “best friend.” On one feminist level, that makes a lot of sense if the man is leaving the toxic grab-ass world of Bro Culture to finally see at least one woman as an equal partner, but on another feminist level what does this really do for the wife?

This is exactly what happened in my marriage.

And soon as Andi and I connected and certainly after we got married and became parents, I shed my wonderful posse of friends, most of them men. No more going out to shows together, planning weekends at festivals, or just hanging out after work. She became “my world.” That can seem very romantic and much of it seems like a wonderful dream, but I never once saw the burden I was laying on her by making her “my person.”

She suddenly was cast into numerous roles, from my therapist to my financial (and fashion) advisor, all of which were unpaid. I relied on her opinion and no-one else. In co-dependent relationship, we often give people power they don’t actually want. You can put me in charge of the criminal investigation of Donald Trump, and while that might sound awesome, I don’t actually want that power. And it is a power thing because it’s not equally shared. If I played the exact same roles for her, it wouldn’t be an issue. I didn’t expect her to do the laundry but I did expect her to “fix” me.

I would often be confused by her response to me saying things like, “You saved me.” I considered it a compliment. But it wasn’t her job to save me. And who was supposed to save her if she was spending her time on the project that was her husband? She couldn’t save herself because she was supposed to be saving me. All this saving. It didn’t occur to me to just save my goddamn self. After all, I had her to do that.

It’s not surprising that my wife began to quietly resent me. My broad social circle shrunk down to just her and it must have been suffocating. She was my “rock,” which meant I relied on her for everything, without really returning the favor. Where, previously, I might complain about work with my friends over a beer, it was now on her shoulders. The encouragement to make it through the matrix of life now only came from her (and phone calls with my other female/therapist, my mother). Where was the reciprocity?

One of the wonderful things this separation has given us is the space to save ourselves. Watching her evolution this past year, free of my emotional burdening (and constant need of her approval) has been wondrous. I now have an amazing therapist who I pay to do the emotional servicing I expected from Andi. And I’m rebuilding my friendships with peers. I live in a city with countless coffeeshops and bars. There are plenty of places to share some bonhomie with my dudes.

The division of labor makes sense. Brothers, don’t expect your wife or girlfriend to be your “everything.” It’s not fair to them. You are not their project. Learn from my mistakes, save yourself. And get a good therapist.

My Jim Crow Marriage: MAGA Co-dependency

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

July 21, 2022

There’s so much going on in the world. The Earth is literally on fire. It’s a nice distraction from my personal problems. I can doom-scroll through some GoPro footage from the battlefields of Ukraine or watch endless hours of commentary on the January 6th hearings. I used to drink through the rough patches. Now I just mainline the outside world.

As a Pisces, I tend to be overdramatic. Things aren’t that bad. Just the summer doldrums of separation. I’ve been trying to learn more about co-dependent relationships and, man, did I have one. I’m not 100% sure that learning about it makes you any less co-dependent, or will help Andi end up back under the same roof, but it sure shines a light and why we were stuck and not making any progress. She was the fixer and I was he who perpetually needed be fixed.

I’ve been having some pretty good conversations about the topic with my therapist. Knowing I’m a Pisces, she’s liberal with the diagrams. She drew two overlapping equal sized circles on a piece of paper and explained that in a healthy relationship two people take up equal space and they overlap in the space of their relationship but they have a larger part of themselves that’s not defined by the relationship. And they can both bring in things to share in the overlap or keep them as part of themselves.

In a co-dependent relationship, one person is a bigger circle that completely envelopes the other circle. That enveloped person has a) a smaller space, b) has no self outside the relationship and c) is always struggling against the confines of the bigger circle. That was us. Even though I encouraged her life outside of our relationship (she got a master’s degree and was an elected officer in her union without my help), when we were together, I did a pretty good job of swallowing her back into what I was jokingly referred to as “Randyland” (a term she understandably loathed). Just like how a person of color is forced to define themselves in relation to “whiteland,” her existence was shaped by our relationship instead of the other way around.

My therapist asked me to conjure up a romantic image of us and I remembered our first trip to Andi’s home town of Morelia, Mexico in 2013. Instead of me being the tour guide in Portland, she led me through her beautiful city, holding my hand. I imagined myself as a balloon safely in her grasp, seeing the world through her eyes. But it was just a flip of our co-dependent dynamic. Now I was the small circle, encompassed by her. As wonderful as it felt, it still wasn’t balanced.

Then she asked me to remember another romantic moment that seemed more balanced and I immediately flashed to our trip to Oslo, Norway in 2018, a city that was new to both us. I was returning from a day at a conference and Andi was coming to find me because she had discovered the most amazing record store on earth and when we ran into each other on the sidewalk, we were those perfectly equal interlocking circles.

The reality is that we had those moments (our first week in a youth hostel on Isla Mujeres with sand in the bed and Macklemore playing every night), but there was a lot more suffocation in Randyland. I get why she needed to break free.

OK, this is the part where I link it to Trump. Hang with me.

You know the MAGA thing? That “Make America Great Again” implies that America’s not great but it was sometime in the mythical past. Trump picked 1950 when America was last great. 1950, the peak of Jim Crow segregation. 1950, before the modern feminist movement, the gay rights movement, and the disability rights movement. If you were a black transperson in a wheelchair, America was not great in 1950. Or a woman. And TVs sucked. Give me my 2022 Samsung flatscreen TV and my pronouns and leave 1950 to your back & white fantasy. Father knew best, or so we were told. The MAGA crowd wants that bullshit past back. They dream of the by-gone days of Jim Crow. Colin Kaepernick “knew his place” in 1950.

But that’s the thing. We over-nostalgize the past. It was always better back then. Music was better. Fashion was better. It was a “simpler” time, blah, blah, blah. In fact, the past was both great and shitty, just like the present. And it was plenty complex, but we were familiar with the complexity. The future is uncertain and the past is a cozy blanket. No wonder people want to go back to it. And that tendency just gets worse the older you get. The 2010s, ah those were the days. The past is a safe haven for the timid. The future is scary as hell. You saw what happened with Bitcoin. But you’ve really gotta embrace the unknown, as frightening as it is. It might kick you in the crotch, but it’s better than spending your life reminiscing about your baseball card collection.

We do the same damn thing when a relationship is ending. “But it was so great! Look at how happy we are in these pictures.” The reality, like America in 1950, is more complex. It was great and shitty. There were plenty of hard times. But I remember it more fondly because I was the planet she revolved around. I was white Father Knows Best guy. For her it was Jim Crow. She was the “colored girl” who needed to get the hell out of Mississippi.

Coming to terms with co-dependency means acknowledging the imbalance. I don’t know if Andi and I will have any more “Oslo moments.” I hope so. But I understand why she had to escape Randyland. I’m escaping it, too.

My last hours of 57, when I grew up.

~ Randy Blazak ~ 3 Comments

February 19, 2022

When you grow up in the South, age 33 is supposed to be the transformative year. After all, that’s the year that Jesus got his shit together to fulfill the prophecy of getting himself executed. Southern wisdom is that if you’re not married by 33, maybe with a kid but definitely with your economic house in order, you’re are letting Ol’ Jesus down. For me, 17 was the year I got out of the house and figured out I was going become an academic instead of dentist. Thank Jesus. That was a year my sense of self felt like it was really coming together.

This is my last day as a 57-year-old and that brace-faced teenager seems light years away (and so does the 33-year-old). The past 12 months have been more transformative than anything I’ve ever encountered. When I look back at February 2021 me, I barely recognize the guy. Somethings are sadly the same. I’m still lobbying for a job in the Biden Administration and there still isn’t a fully functioning kitchen in this house, but the person in this spot has shed that skin. 2021 me looked like a lost boy, bouncing in the glee of the moment, but taking everything around him for granted.

If there was any year I wish I could have a do-over it would be 57. Previously it was 16 (so I could go to New York and save John Lennon) and then it was 21 (just because it was so incredibly awesome). But 57 was a year of stupid mistakes, like beginner blunders on a chess board. Beside forgetting Andi and my wedding anniversary for the second year in the row, I had fairly spectacular meltdowns in New Orleans and at the final night of Mary’s Club that had her questioning my sanity. In between those, I uncovered my history of child sexual abuse but not before I further sabotaged her trust in me. The new year began with me back on the proverbial cliff, contemplating non-existence. It was a hard year. Hard on my family.

The good news is I got back on the anti-depressants and found a therapist who really helped me get to the root issues, leading to what feels like a complete rebirth from the troubled narcissist I was. My journey in therapy began in 1998 when I was forced to confront some of those issues around depression. It generated a good book on the subject (that I’m proud of and everyone should buy), but it never really got to the starting point of my tendency to shoot myself in the foot over and over again. Thanks to Andi encouraging me to read more on my issues, I picked up a few books on Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) and then found a somatic therapist who specialized in hypo-therapy. It was time to go deep. This is the year my Saturn is in return, so big change is inevitable.

The time spent in therapy has been revelatory. The first time she put me into a relaxed state where I could actually talk to that 4-year-old boy who had been abused changed my whole way of being. I began to let go of my constant anger (which I visualized as the Incredible Hulk) that I laid on anyone in my radius, including my family and my wife. Developing skills to be mindful of my emotions reminded me that I can center other people and not be dangerously vulnerable. And being safely vulnerable is actually a good thing. (Yeah, I now know all about Brené Brown. She’s a rock star.) I can finally breathe. It’s going to be alright.

Today, our daughter asked if Andi was going to move back home. On the weeks Andi has Cozy, I spend as much time in her apartment as I do in our house, often laying next to her in bed in the early morning minutes before the alarm clock goes off, watching her sleep and thinking about how I used to complain about her snoring. I am in love with that snore. Old Randy might have asked his daughter to play some Jedi mind tricks on Mom, but I just said, “I hope she does, but I don’t really know. It’s up to her but whatever she chooses, we want her to be happy.”

There was a moment in this process where I saw a truth that Andi had long known, that when you truly love someone, you live to serve them, not your ego. I am here to serve her and our daughter, in whatever capacity the universe allows. My journey through the challenge of self-work this year highlighted that our complacency with our selves and our relationships is our biggest threat to our happiness. It’s too easy to be lazy in our culture, scrolling through life. We’re not done. There’s work unfinished. At least there is for me.

I turn 58 tomorrow. That used to seem so old. But I feel like I just grew up.

Pandemic Nostalgia: Save a Mask, It’s Coming!

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

June 4, 2021

We social scientists love to come up with sharp names for social phenomenon. I’ve written a lot in this blog about anomie, Emile Durkheim’s 1897 term for the sense of normlessness that’s helped to explain the backslide into Trumpism. There’s been a lot of talk about Naomi Klein’s 2007 concept of shock doctrine again. But there are some phenomenon that still have no name, like when your walk into a bookstore or record store and immediately forget what you were looking for. Or when vintage t-shirts for a band that you know and love are being sold at Urban Outfitters to posers who never listened to the damn band. (“Name one Motorhead song! I dare you!”) There should be a name for that!

There’s another phenomenon as yet unnamed – feeling nostalgic for really horrible times. I just finished reading The Volunteer, Jack Fairweather’s epically researched 2019 book about a Polish officer who snuck into Auschwitz in 1940 and spent the next two and half years sending out reports of Nazi atrocities and organizing the camp resistance. Then when it became clear that the concentration camp had transitioned into a mass death camp, he escaped. When he was out, with good food and free from Typhus-infected lice and the stench of burning bodies, you know what he wanted to do? Go back! That world made sense, unlike the blasé attitude (that’s Georg Simmel’s concept) towards the Holocaust he found outside the camp.

I first experienced this weird feeling about a year after 9/11. The 2001 terrorist attacks had unified the nation. Republican and Democratic congress people stood together on the steps of the Capitol and sang “God Bless In America.” I was in Atlanta where locals covered their “Yankees Suck!” T-shirts with “I Love New York.” Sure there was some serious Islamophobia and a spike in xenophobic hate crimes, but there was also a powerful sense that we were all in this together. I miss that. Do we need another slaughter of civilians to get that feeling back?

As the COVID-19 pandemic wanes, I can already feel that old itch coming back. As of today, 136 million Americans are fully vaccinated (About 41.5% of the US population). Kids are wrapping up the last of their remote learning and we even saw a movie in a movie theater last weekend! There are nearly 4 million souls worldwide to mourn (with deaths spiking in India and Vietnam) and a mental health toll that will take generations to fully see, but, at least here on the home front, you can lay off the mask-making, feverous hand-washing, and crossing the street to avoid a panting jogger. Happy days are here again.

So what’s that tinge? The dread of having to jump back into the endless rush hour commute or the race to get the kid to school on time? Not having an excuse to not hang out with boring people? Having to find your pants? (Or buy new ones because you were binging on Love Island while devouring countless mole burritos, delivered by GrubHub?) The earth got a year-long break from us as the drop in our carbon footprints let us see the horizon for the first time in a generation. (“I didn’t know the Himalayas were right there!”) Although, I imagine landfills exploded with take-out containers in 2020. Are we ready to say goodbye to those random whiffs of fresh air?

Around mid-March 2020, when it started to be clear we were going to have to hunker down for a while, I said goodbye to some life-sustaining activities, like seeing live music and being belly-up to the bar with a whiskey ginger and set of great songs cued up on the jukebox. But I also thought of the things I’d have time to do, like read for fun and work on fixing up the house. Andi and I even started writing a screenplay. Most of that fell by the wayside as we found solace in the endless stream of Hulu and Netflix. Maybe we’ll finish the screenplay during the next pandemic. (Jinks!)

So I never got around to reading War & Peace (but I did spend way too many hours dissecting the new Dylan album). However one wonderful thing that came out of the lockdown was the opportunity to work on my marriage. There was really no escape, so it was either that or build myself a shed in the backyard. With ample supplies from the thank-god-it-stayed-open liquor store, we stayed up late into the nights, talking about how to build a stronger connection that was as beneficial to her. Zoom therapy sessions helped me identify some useful tools and Andi gave me a reading list. The book You Might be a Narcissist If…: How to Identify Narcissism in Ourselves and Others and What We Can Do About It turned my whole head around within two pages. There were some rough moments when I thought Donald Trump wasn’t the only thing that was going to get canceled by COVID, but she encouraged me to do the work and not fall back on old lazy habits. Without the 9-5 and the call of the nightlife, I could focus on what was and is important.

Perhaps everyone found a silver lining during this mess. So many of us, fearing for older family members, brought people together through Zoom sessions. I talked to my mother on the phone this year more than I have in the last 5 years combined. Neighbors began looking out for each other, making masks and hot meals and checking on that crazy old man nobody ever talks to. There was an explosion of book clubs and cocktail parties on Google Meet

As I craved live music, online concerts from home became a lifeline. (Ben Gibbard and Kevn Kinney, thank you.) And all the free webinars plugged me into global community of peers. We spent plenty of time over the last year in the streets, but there was plenty of activism that was happening in front of laptops. Just the fact that† my first grader spent this past February digesting amazing stories for Black History Month gave me hope that consciousness raising can happen on a keyboard. I know I wasn’t the only one who used the down time to plug into the whole wide world via webcam.

No doubt around 2030 they will start throwing 2020 socially distanced parties, and people can go to the costume store and buy face masks, sweat pants and “Got My Fauci Ouchie!” T-shirts. We can not invite anti-Asian hate criminals and the phony militia men protesting public health mandates, as we dance alone to oldies by DaBaby and/or Lil Baby and pretend we don’t know what day it is. Me at this moment, I’m just trying to come up a name for the strange feeling that I’m a little sad this nightmare is ending. Just a little.

Should we care about Donald Trump’s marriage? (Or anybody else’s?)

~ Randy Blazak ~ 5 Comments

May 25, 2017

melania_hand_swat

The only thing more sporting lately than trying to guess when Donald Trump’s house of cards will collapse has been trying to guess when his wife will dump him. The numerous swats and cold shoulders Melania gave Donald that were caught on camera during their recent trip abroad (leading one to believe there was something that wasn’t caught on camera) have tongues wagging. Even the Pope seemed reluctant to touch the “pussy grabber’s” hand. What had Trump done this time? Stories swirled that the divorce papers were already drawn up. Is Melania Trump the real life Claire Underwood.

Will Donald Trump be the first sitting president to be divorced?

Why should we care?

white-house-staff-share-somber-details-of-how-hillary-clinton-coped-with-the-monica-lewinsky-affair

It’s not like Donald Trump is the first philandering president. Some are legendary, like Thomas Jefferson and John Kennedy. Some forgotten. (Warren G. Harding made Charlie Sheen look like he wasn’t even trying.) I’m still not sure why Hillary Clinton stuck with cigar-screwing Bill. I guess some couples can just work through having one partner’s sexcipades splashed across the front page. Is oral sex “sex”? In the 1990s, every man, woman, and child in the country got to participate in that discussion. It was so much fun.

Donald J. Trump’s sexual boasts are nothing new. He’s bragged about his sexual adventures on Howard Stern and probably still does to any (Russian agent) person who will listen. His “locker room talk” about groping women is it’s own Wikipedia entry. It’s clear that he cheated on his first two wives, so why should it be any different for Melania Knavs? As the President has said, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”

Who cares?

Obviously, when it comes to the Trump presidency, there are bigger carp to fry. (Do Russians fry carp?) He’s going down and the even more sexually freaky Mike Pence will be in the high chair by this time next year. Should we waste time on Trump’s doomed marriage? It’s private business. Maybe we should document this doomed presidency for future generations and leave his weird marriage to the highly-paid lawyers to sort out.

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On one hand, we know that Trump is impulsive, narcissistic, kinda dumb, and needs to tell the world that, despite his tiny hands, he has an at least average-sized penis. That’s a bit frightening for a guy who commander and chief of the American armed forces. You get the feeling that he’s just itching to nuke North Korea, or Iran, or California, just to prove he’s big boy. His personal insecurities play out daily in his mishandling of national security issues, his reverse-Robin Hood budget, and his dealings with our enemies (“I’m gonna win Vladimir’s love!”) and our allies. (Who can forget his refusing to shake Angela Merkel’s hand?). That fact that he tweets more about his ratings and portrayal on TV shows than issues Americans care about is a reflection of how emotionally deprived this guy is.

On the other hand, every marriage has its rough patches. When some silver-haired couple is celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary, you better believe there were plenty of moments where they were close to killing each other. Those happy smiles might mask parallel dark thoughts. (“How is this asshole still alive? I need my freedom!”) Most of us suffer through it in anonymity, maybe sharing our woes with a bartender or on an instantly regretted Facebook post. The President’s life has become the People’s life. JFK is lucky there was no social media 55 years ago. #jackkkennedygavemecrabs You almost feel sorry for the first couple. What did those swats from Melania really mean? Let’s ask Rachel Maddow!

Trump and I have one thing in common, we’re both on our third marriages. I often have to pull back from immediate criticism because I know that loving marriages can fail and sometimes it takes a while to figure out how to actually “do” marriage. My wife is also younger and, like Melania, might have been an illegal immigrant at some point. But there are some serious differences after that. Unlike Trump, I’m a committed feminist who works to make marriage an equitable partnership. As a stay at home dad, I’m happy to take a back seat as Andrea builds her career in the legal world. As I told her this morning, I’m happy to be the guy riding on her coattails. And I have zero desire to be unfaithful to her. “So much winning” for me is to be with her at the end of the road. Also, I’m not the President of the United States.

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Feminists seem torn on how to frame Melania Trump’s situation. Some see her as a victim, trapped in a loveless marriage to a cad who collects sexual assaults the way Bill Cosby collects, well, sexual assaults. (Google: rape culture.) She likely signed some contract that said, if Donald won the White House, she wouldn’t legally divorce him but could stay away from his icky hands in their penthouse in NYC. The other narrative says she’s a smart cookie and knew exactly what she was getting into when she married America’s favorite rich pig and that any woman who props up a man while he rips away women’s health care and goes after reproductive rights around the globe deserves exactly what she gets.

Is Melania Trump a tragic figure or a villain? Should we send in Seal Team 6 to rescue her or ask Robert Mueller to investigate what links she has to Russian ambassadors?

The gossip part of my brain wants to hear all the sordid details. But I’ve been the victim of that type of gossip so why should I fuel the fire? Anyone reading this will more than likely outlive Donald J. Trump (What happened to that “stamina”?), and I’m sure they will outlive his presidency, so we can read all the books then. I don’t doubt that Bill O’Reilly already has a contract for Killing Trump. After eight years of the blissfully scandal-free marriage of Barrack and Michelle Obama, it’s tempting to go all TMZ on this circus sideshow. (If he’s not sleeping with his wife, where does that mighty Trump penis go at night?”) Let’s just focus on how he’s screwing the country.  Let’s let his marriage suffer in silence. Absolute, stone-faced silence.

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So I Married an Alien

~ Randy Blazak ~ 5 Comments

Sept. 8, 2016

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I thought I should post this little confession. I married an alien. She invaded America in 1998, coming from a strange land called Mexico. Now if she was a white person we would just call her an “ex-pat,” but Americans prefer to refer to non-white visitors who weren’t born here as “immigrants.” If they came here to escape war or violence or just the American dream of economic mobility but they didn’t come through the very tiny door controlled by the federal bureaucracy we all love so much, they are called “undocumented immigrants,” or what the Trump crowd prefers, “illegal aliens.” I’m going to compromise and refer to my wife as an undocumented alien. It sounds more X-Files. And sexy. Hey, I saw a cute alien finger and I put a ring on it! (Or rather, she graciously allowed me the great honor.)

Now before Donald sounds the butt bugle for his quasi-fascist “deportation force,” let me say she now has papers. Thanks to immigration reforms under the first Clinton administration (See what I did there?), a loophole opened and she earned a green card that establishes a right to permeant residence in the USA. I just hope we can find it if Donald’s thugs kick down our door in the middle of the night as they round up the “very bad people” the Mexican government is “sending here” to “kill us.”

I mention this because, like most intelligent Americans, I have whiplash from trying to figure out what the fuck Trump’s ever-changing immigration policy is. Is he planning on asking “his generals” to come up with the answer to that one as well? It seems his policy is based on who his audience is and if his teleprompter is working or not. It certainly was a lot of xenophobic screaming after he returned from his brief trip to Mexico.

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There are a couple of reasons this matters. First, as I’ve written about many times in this blog, he is using scare tactics to whip white voters into a frenzy. His recent cavalcade of “angel moms” whose kids were allegedly killed by undocumented immigrants is a classic example. Of course it’s heartbreaking to have a family member murdered, but most people are murdered by people they are closely connected to, not the neighbor’s gardner. According to FBI crime statistics, only 12.3% of homicides are committed by strangers. Donald Trump is more likely to be murdered by Donald Trump, Jr. than an documented immigrant. But he’s successfully made brown immigrants into this season’s Willie Horton bogey man.

Despite his claim that America is a “complete disaster. Believe me.” – the crime rate has steadily been dropping in this country since 1993 at a rate of about 5% a year. And not only do immigrants have lower rates of crime offending than non-immigrants, studies show that cities with higher undocumented populations have lower crime rates. Think about it – If I’m here without papers, I’m not even going to jaywalk for fear of being discovered by police who might deport me and send me far from my family and my job. (And by the way, as Mexican President Peña Nieto pointed out to Trump’s confused face, illegal immigration to the U.S. has also been steadily declining, but, you know, THE SKY IS FALLING.)

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The second reason this is important is that all those “illegal aliens” that the Trump mob loves to hate and are convinced are stealing “their” jobs (picking strawberries) have stories. Some are escaping the insane violence of El Salvador and sending them back would be a death sentence. Some just want a better life for their children. Andrea wrote about her crossing so beautifully in the new collection, A Journey of Words. She didn’t come here to steal anybody’s job or rip anybody off. She came to live and to make America greater, as generations of immigrants, both legal and illegal (whatever that really means), have before and after her.

I feel like we’re at a turning point. So much of the political rhetoric from the Trump mob sounds like Germany in 1933 or even the United States in 1942, when 120,000 Japanese-American citizens and Japanese immigrants were ripped from their homes and thrown in desolate concentration camps until the end of the war. I wonder if my daughter, who Trump has hinted is not guaranteed citizenship just because she was born here, will be safe even if America’s favorite con artist loses in November.

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It’s clear that many of Trump’s thugs could care less about the facts, whether it’s Trump lying on TV about his past statements (that happen to be on video) or just repeating the “Crooked Hillary” mantra in hopes that truthiness beats out the truth. I’ve given up trying to convince these people. But I think if they just knew somebody like Andrea or any of the twelve million people who are here without papers, Trump’s fear mongering would fall on deaf ears.

Remember when pretty much every gay person outside of San Francisco was in the closet? (Maybe you’re not old enough.) As those people found the courage to come out, attitudes changed. A guy in Omaha had a harder time going off about “them queers” because he probably knew (and liked) some people who were gay. Just think of all the people in the Bible Belt who watch Ellen Degeneres five days a week. They must be pretty conflicted about the “hate the sin, love the sinner” crap they are supposed to believe.

It’s time for these same people to get to know their neighborhood undocumented immigrant. Who knows – they might also find love.