TL,DR: the pantheon is fucking up by letting my son die and DJT live.

Ariadne. Where are you? I’m lost. Or is your thread–cheat only for male warriors with an agenda?

Eros? Have you lost your mind? Every memory of my departed son is saturated with love, I mean grief, I mean love.

Diana, could you please get it together and take down the orange beast who threatens the well-being of all? No need to offer his head on a platter, just slay the fucker. One arrow. Please.

Persephone! I saw you there at the edge of the field of summer, disappearing in one fell tug. Hades must’ve grabbed you by the ankles. I wonder does the violent descent get easier with practice?

Does love, I mean grief, I mean love, get easier with practice? And what even is practice? It’s temporal. It’s repetition across time.

All practice leads to death.

Kronos. Have you anything to say about the merciless rigors of time? You say you’re neutral but we all know you pal around with the Grim Reaper.

Why is that bloviated menace still alive while my handsome son with the gracious smile is not?

Maybe stumbling clueless through the labyrinth is the better way to go – every bruise informing the next direction. Go left! Bump. No, go right!

If Hades can steal a youthful girl for a season of rape, why can’t he kidnap an 80-year-old man and dish him some of his own medicine and by his own medicine I mean, of course, rape?

I thought you gods were into retribution, just and unjust punishments, and hungry sexual predation.

Just ask Leda. 

I swept dead leaves from the curb in preparation of this week’s storm. Heavy rain carries debris from the roadside and deposits it on the storm drain down the street. The innocent flow of water down the hill will create a lake if it’s clogged and if there’s a lake, there’s a good chance water will seep into our basement.

Some storms you can prepare for. Others, merely witness. 

To be present while one’s child, craftily and in mute despair, marches to his own self-inflicted death is a torture that I wish on no one. 

Well, maybe one someone, except that sick someone is so very without heart, I’m not sure that if his namesake offed himself he’d even care. I mean, the fat turd didn’t even attend the kid’s wedding.

Penelope wove and undid and wove and undid, sitting at the loom of worried expectation. She didn’t know if Odysseus, her somewhat scurrilous, conceited husband, would return.

When you read the epic poem knowing the outcome, the waiting seems trivial. We forget: she did not know.

Same with all those movies set in the early 40’s in France and England with a neighboring monster on a eugenic rampage. They did not know who would emerge the victor.

We did not know our son had bought a gun. We did not know he would really end his life. We worried and listened to the wind. We offered words of hope, delivered plates of apple slices with cinnamon.

He was having none of it. If he was Theseus, he would’ve run with unerring accuracy right into the maw of the monster. Go right! Yes, now go left!

That monster had been dogging him for years.

Sweeping up dead leaves is one thing, offering pumpkin bread and hugs to a high school friend of your dead son is another.

“We were a lot of us desperate,” he tells me. He tells me, “I went to Denver and I called and I called and he didn’t answer.”

This young man, now the age that my dead son will forever be, is getting married next year and even though I’ve only just met him, I want to be invited.

All the passages now foreclosed to our second born.

How do you even name your new circumstance? “Raised two boys. One of California, one formerly of Colorado.” That’s one new bio. That damn word count!

When the rain gets heavy this weekend, I will pray for my boy. Pray that he rests in the shelter of his own expanded self. Pray that the suffering he so doggedly encountered in life, has fallen away, leaving him pure essence, pure intelligence, pure heart.

America is dying by suicide too by the way.

So go ahead, put our dear leader’s name on the Ford Theater and then maybe by some mojo or other, he’ll share Lincoln’s demise. Can I even say that here or will some Palantir search engine find me and take me down?

Ask me if I care, Athena, but perhaps lend me your shield.