Bouquets and Brickbats
Brickbat
For the Boeing Corporation, which has stranded US astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore in space since June with no end in sight, thanks to the faulty engineering and construction of the company’s supposedly reusable Starlight spacecraft, which experienced software failures, five helium leaks, and five thruster failures and has repeatedly been judged unsafe for flight by NASA engineers, who now expect the astronauts to remain stranded in space for another six months. Not that NASA had a particularly great record in building spacecraft that didn’t explode, but at least they didn’t leave astronauts stranded in space and shrug their shoulders. American air travelers can relate, having endured a summer of record travel delays and cancelations thanks in part to the repeated mechanical failure of Boeing aircraft. Hiring skilled engineers and metal-workers …
Blame the Butcher
The syringes and the diabetes testing strips are just two sides of the same bad penny.
We are not the giants we were meant to be
What have they ever got done?
Poverty, like butchery, is the commodification of the parts to the desecration of the whole. America is a people in squalor, trafficked by godless, market-based renderings. Our bodies are monetized, while our souls are demonetized. It’s unholy, the grifts we bear. From birth house to death house, we are hustled for parts. Our parts.
South Phoenix is 50 percent Latino, 25 percent black, 25 percent white, and 100 percent piss-poor. Myself, I’m three quarters bastard, one quarter Irish. We’re always working, so we’re always in the Poor House. When my girl Cricket and I moved here in 2009, peak Great Recession, we came for proximity to the cancer-discharging fuel terminals and concrete plants where the trucking jobs are always available. We were both hazmat tanker truckers at the time. I still am. I drive a bomb that has yet to go off.
The air here is acrid from auto parts recyclers, plating factories, …
Buddy the Gravedigger
Everybody wants something better. It’s just a matter of getting it.
Born with a shovel in his hands
The only undertaker he trusts is his daughter.
Buddy scooped the rainwater out of the fresh grave with the same excavator bucket he used to dig the hole. It’d been raining for days and the grave was at the bottom of a hill, so the hole kept flooding. He and his employee, George, had a few hours to keep the water out of the grave before the funeral. This was at the far edge of the cemetery, near the house with the pig in the yard that gets aggressive whenever he hears George come through with the mower.
Buddy is a third-generation gravedigger in the panhandle of West Virginia.
“I was born with a shovel in my hands,” he said.
I typically sit by Buddy in church. When he’s not digging graves, he likes to work on the church. It’s an old church, and he takes pride in its care. There are a few gravestones in the yard, and he’s dug one of those as well.
Our small congregation has breakfast together in the church kitchen after service on the …
