I woke up early so I could paint the signs I traced the night before to thank Adam Schiff who seems like the one guy keeping my Dad’s Country from becoming Russia West. And there’s driving to do, but first I had to attend a funeral for a guy I hadn’t seen in Jesus… forty-five years. But I was there because he was my best friend in elementary school. In fact, he was my only friend in elementary school, because truth be told, he was the only person who’d be my friend in that particular elementary school. So thanks to him I had someone to talk to, ride bikes with, laugh and speculate about life with besides my family from grades 4 through 8. And then we drifted apart, made new friends… he got into surfing and I got shipped off to boarding school and then went on to live our lives with hardly a thought of one another.
But when I came home to take care of my mom I found out he was still around because he never really left and I swore I’d hook up with him again but never did because there was always time until suddenly there wasn’t. So I buy some decent clothes and find myself at his funeral telling his sisters and brother “Hey, Brad was my friend when nobody else would be my friend and it meant the goddam world to me…” but it’s not the same and hell, it’s their brother’s funeral and everybody’s telling them stuff like that.
So I’m driving up to LA on the 405, remembering Brad and reminiscing about our innocence: when the world was just riding bikes and playing Hot Wheels and being too young to wonder or even care about what life had in store for us. And it’s not until I take the Manchester/La Cienega exit that I snap back into it: I’m on a mission. I take the first right, drive seven blocks and take another right and park at the end of a cul-de-sac, crawl under one fence and climb over another one on to a ledge to get into a shut-down overpass to hang up an American flag and a sign thanking a Congressman for standing up against the criminals and traitors that’ve taken over our country.
You know that feeling when you’ve been distracted for a few hours and totally forget that Donald Trump is the President of the United States, but then you have to wake up and come back to what passes these days as the “Real World?” Believe me, it’s amplified when you’ve just spent most of the day reminiscing about your childhood friend in the early 70’s and then wake up in 2019 on a ledge over the 405 just to thank a congressman for reminding Republicans - Republicans for chrissakes - that conspiring with Russia is bad. (I know I’m always saying what I do isn’t dangerous, and it’s not. but this one overpass is the exception, requiring about ten feet of exposed ledge: it’s just like free-climbing Half Dome except it only takes four seconds and there’s a whole bunch of bars and cyclone fencing to hold on to.
Driving to the next spot I see this is still up and even after almost 20 years of doing this it still makes me gasp. Four days that’s been up now - right over the thick of it, 150,000 cars per day heading east on the Santa Monica Freeway. (Sure, I’m not getting the ones at night, but hell, I can afford it.) There’s something on the preceding overpass though - I couldn’t quite read it, but I think it says triggered and Trump so I go check it out. Grommeted vinyl, “Triggered by Trump.” I guess that means me.
Irony of course being they were triggered by my sign into printing up these things - which were probably $50 a pop - but they couldn’t take mine down because that’d mean climbing a wall. Lazy fucks. No wonder they think that’s all it’s gonna take to keep the Mexicans out.
I liked that they used the “triggering” trope because at the end of the day that’s really all this is for them - triggering the liberals. I wished I had a Treason sign because “Triggered by Treason” would look good and be pretty funny and to the point, but I put this in instead. Still can’t read it well because of the idiot placement.
On the way to the next site the radio’s telling me it’s time to move on - the Russia thing’s over, Americans don’t care about it. They care about economic issues and healthcare and I think “Really? Y’all don’t care about being ruled by Russia huh? Wish you’d mentioned it before - would’ve saved us like One Hundred Trillion Fucking Dollars you made us spend ‘cuz y’all were so scared of the Russians…” And so I sit there in traffic thinking for the one-millionth time how I’m just wasting my time. That the country I’ve been fighting for’s long gone, and America’s just like all the rest of my parent’s stuff I’ve still got in storage, something that’s lost almost all its value that I’m only hanging on to because they cared about it so much.
But I go and hang my sign and one more even though the sun’s almost down because it’s important to thank people while you still can.