Inside the Times – May 26, 2030

NATIONAL

BP Drilling for Salt Water

With sea water in the Gulf of Mexico and two-thirds of the world’s oceans now completely replaced with oil from its still-gushing underwater well, BP today said that since two-decade’s worth of attempts to completely cap the well have failed, it will now begin drilling the ocean floor to look for salt water which will be pumped back into the Gulf; this in a last ditch effort to correct the environmental disaster that began more than 20 years ago last month. PAGE 10A

Still No Place like Home for 2010 Graduates

Although still out of work from the effects of the great recession of 2008 coupled with the negative economic impact from having the world’s oceans replaced with crude oil, more than 90 percent of the now middle-aged graduating class of 2010 report they are still “very happy” living at home with their parents who have had to continue to work into their 80’s and 90’s to support their aging children. PAGE 14A

Republican Cheer “Suck and Fill” Bill

The Republican Party, once severely critical of the Obama administration’s failure to control the massive oil spill off the Louisiana coast, today celebrated the passage of the “Suck and Fill” Bill which allows motorists in all 25 coastal US States to pay for the right to suck their own unrefined petroleum directly from oil-rich waterways for personal use in specially designed crude oil burning vehicles; the measure is expected to produce trillions in tax revenues which Democratic law makers vow to use to clean the massive influx of pollution from the new, unregulated oil-burning cars and trucks. PAGE A23


INTERNATIONAL

Asian Engineers Turn Oil into Gold

While out of work US adults ranging in age from 20 to 50 are becoming increasingly unproductive living at home with their parents, over one billion unemployed but enterprising scientists and engineers now living in India, Japan and China have discovered that oil washing up on beaches and riverbanks can be used to turn a profit in surprising ways ranging from use in homemade skin creams and soda pop to the manufacture of counterfeit gold Rolex watches and 64 GB WiFi enabled iPads, all using makeshift techniques developed in labs and engineering facilities long ago abandoned by the world’s failing corporations . PAGE C4

“Axis of Evil” Said to be Developing Grease Bomb

With UN and diplomatic efforts over the last 20 years having thus far prevented the spread of nuclear weapons in the Middle East and parts of Asia, international intelligence agencies now report that North Korea, Iraq and Iran are all in the process of developing so-called “grease bombs” which reportedly pack the oil sludge now commonly found as far as 20 miles inland into long range tactical missiles that can spread the sludge over cities and towns as far as 1000 miles inland. PAGE C12



LIVING

Bankers Now Truly Filthy Rich

Now that Republican lawmakers have succeeded in repealing the last of the banking policies put into place with Democratic oversight, bankers and financial executives again reaping astronomical profits from unregulated investments are searching for creative ways in which to spend them – one outlet they have found are so-called “Oil Resorts,” luxury spas where the super rich can now truly become filthy rich by lolling in wave pools filled with oil and where chefs barbecue dolphins and pelicans over giant oil-fueled barbecue pits. PAGE B28


BUSINESS

Health Care, Who Cares

For years health care was one of the top concerns of American families and a vast source of revenue for insurance conglomerates, but with oil having permeating the national consciousness in the same way it has permeated oceans and rivers, many Americans are turning to these same insurance conglomerates for “oil policies” which insure their homes and property from rapidly advancing seas of oil – Government officials in partnership with insurance corporations have been quick to dub this “not your father’s oil policy,” seeing it as a way to demonstrate that they finally have an oil policy that addresses the needs of the American people. PAGE C28


ENTERTAINMENT

“Chico and the Oil Cam” Becomes Longest Running Web Video Feed Sit Com

Alessandra Stanley reviews the final episode of the twentieth season of “Chico and the Oil Cam” where drilling rig supervisor Chico and his team of bumbling underpaid and undocumented aliens from 16 countries work in scuba gear using waterproof cement mixers and submergible wheel barrows in another last ditch attempt to plug a gushing oil well – hilarity ensues; produced by BP Productions, this show is the world’s longest running and highest rated live web video feed sit com. PAGE D6

Rocco V

Rock saw himself killing the man. He watched his right hand lift the marble-based golfing trophy off the credenza display and he felt the heft of it as he swept the point of the little golfer’s head in a wide arch that ended at the upper edge of his boss’s left temple. And that’s when the chills of anxiety rose across the top of Rock’s own head and the light in his boss’s office slowly became too bright to bear. Alive and as of yet unhurt, Rock’s boss shifted position in his chair and tapped a pencil, waiting for Rock to speak.


Why oh why did Rock have to think of these things? And why did he have to envision them so clearly after first flashing on the notion? Why, as gentle as he was otherwise, could he not see that these thoughts were the release mechanism of a healthy mind in a stressful place? Why couldn’t he just let these ideas come and go, effortlessly, like most other men he knew? Guys he worked with and jerked around with could sit out on the plaza at lunch or lean over a two dollar draft on a Tuesday night and talk about horrible things without any emotional consequences. These guys could think up the most heinous of actions, talk about how their own bosses had pissed them off and how they’d like to see the inhuman bastards and frozen bitches they worked for meet an especially rotten end (meaning that that these guys themselves had fantasized about murder). Then these same guys could drain their mugs or crumble up their greasy sandwich wrappers and continue merrily on as if they had just mulled over how they might this weekend plant a flower garden of daisies. To Rock, it seemed that only he remained afraid when thoughts such as these rose to overheat his brain.

The boss and why he had called Rock into his office were actually inconsequential now that the anxiety had surfaced. Yes, Rock had failed to meet the expected outcome of some initiative or other - blah, blaah, blaaah, blaaaa . . . it was all noise now flat-lining in Rock’s head to a single tone like a phone receiver fallen out of its cradle as his boss thumped up and down in his gas-filled desk chair talking about personal commitment and attention to detail. Rock’s anxiety might soon begin to wane, but still he would not be able to keep his mind on anything his boss was saying.

What Rock did have on his mind were questions. More questions about why he was as he was. How had he become this person whose dark thoughts raced even though many a shrink had told him that dark thoughts were normal in a normal life? Why could he not clear his head of this overgrowth of weedy thoughts that threatened to choke off his daylight and oxygen? And the questions didn’t stop there; they just opened more doors out of which tumbled more questions. Why was he obsessed with neatness – a desk that had to be ordered like a battle plan before he could go home, a closet where the clothes and shoes needed to be nearly alphabetical to be correct in his head? And why did he have to hold back tears every time he heard a child sing (never mind what a children’s choir could do to him)? And what about his avoidance of crowded places, and what about the little tick he had where his eyebrows twitched when he was sexually aroused. And then there was his innate intelligence and a desire for more and more education among a family where completing high school was thought to be excessive; what about that? And what about the deep almost spiritual joy he felt when his dog put her head on his lap. Yes some of the questions were quieter and simpler but still Rock wondered endlessly that day - as his boss finished with him - about who and where all this had come from.

Though there were some ways in which he was like other members of his family, Rock could not see how any of his deeper more personal torments, ticks and traits were part of anyone from whom he had sprung. Rock would never be compared to his uncomplicated, engaging mother nor was he his father’s or his grandfather’s son – that was for sure. His father never seemed to have an emotional moment, never a second thought after any deed was done – he was built roughly, and he never spoke when he could get by without speaking; the man could sleep the peaceful sleep of the truly and blessedly ignorant at any time in any place. And his grandfather seemed to be the prototype that his father came from. The old man was Rock’s and Rock’s father’s namesake, Rocco III, the third in a long line of Roccos, and he went as far back on the horizon of personal history as Rock could see, whereupon Rock could not see anything in his grandfather that spoke to Rock’s own personality, only the quirkiness of a hard-edged laborer who drank wine like water and had hands which could crush walnuts between the shims he pulled from an oaken barrel. These men who Rock came from seemed to be stone walls. And that was the biggest, cruelest joke of all – these men from whom Rock had gotten his name were themselves actually as hard as rocks while Rock, though he had inherited the name, had gotten none of the brute and stolid strength of their bodies or their minds.

Question as he might, Rock would never know where it all came from – the wincing thoughts of violence, the fixations, the intelligence and the hair trigger sympathies he had for all things weaker or voiceless. As it is for a billion of us on the planet - a million of which might at this very moment be leaving their bosses offices after having been lectured and humiliated by a man three quarters their age - there was a barrier a thousand miles high that Rock could never rise far enough or live long enough to see over and altogether understand who it was in the distant past that had made him as he was. Better that Rocco V and the rest of us looked to the stars – to the traveling lights of night now centuries along on the journey - to find clues about why we are as we are.

Better still that he stop asking questions, Rock thought, for beyond a certain point the past was closed to all of us, and the only answer that Rock would ever come away with from these questions was that he was for now and forever alone in the star field . . .

Rocco closed his eyes and finished killing the animal with a knife up the belly and across the throat. When he heard the breathing stop and felt the heart go quiet he split open his own eyes and, as soon as the moon and star light made clear the sight of ruptured organs and rivers of blood, Rocco turned his head away and rocked back shivering onto the seat of his breeches. Killing was everywhere around Rocco. It was what a man did to live – this goat had to die or Rocco and family would not eat. But Rocco felt sick and frightened each time he had to do it. Rocco knew that there was something wrong with him – pure and simple. He was convinced of it. Killing the goat at night seemed kinder to Rocco but even that appeared to backfire in superstitious panic: if the sleeping goat could not see Rocco sneaking up to him at night that still meant that God and the Virgin could, and Rocco knew that they thought him cowardly and had cursed him with this feeling of dread because he was less than a man. Rocco believed deeply that this was why chills of fear all out of proportion were raking his back and scalp, why sweat poured from him after killing even though summer in Ortona had begun long ago.

Other men laughed at Rocco. Even Rocco’s own grown son, now 25 plus years with a young son of his own, chuckled about his father’s quirks and sensitivities. This man that Rocco had sired and this grandson that would keep the generations marching toward a great grandson and beyond seemed to have come from another man who was not Rocco. Neither Rocco the Second nor Rocco the Third were anything like Rocco the Patriarch. Already Rocco III at five years old could hold onto a rope that held a dog twice his size while the poor dog dug a rut with his back leg trying to pull away from the little, forged grip of the child. And like his father before him the boy would never cry, even upon being beaten by his mother. Likewise he could take the hottest sunshine in the field and stay beside his father for hours without whining. Rocco’s son and grandson were truly like the rocks they were named after – not what you would call thinking or smart creatures but creatures that were impervious to strain and sweat and pain all the same. Whereas Rocco (no matter that he was the rock from which his son and grandson were chiseled) was looked down on and ridiculed for his softness, for his love of the ancient poetry he found in the sacristy of the church, for the tears that he could not hold back as the children’s choir sang on feast days, for the way he yawned and his eyebrows twitched when pushed toward a man’s pursuits – hunting or killing or fighting or sex with the whores who had been banished to shacks at the outskirts of the village.

Still Rocco stood up as a man and did for his family. And he was proud that he could somehow struggle to farm and build and kill so that they would never have to starve or beg or go homeless. But at night, tired not really from hard work but from the strain of fitting himself into a mold made for other men, Rocco would stare across the waves of heat coming from the wood stove as he watched his wife feed and cradle his children and grandchildren, and Rocco would wish he could be her. Even more than this, Rocco longed for another man or boy with whom he could share his gentle soul. His grandson, Rocco III, would not be that boy and this would likely be the farthest into the future that Rocco would ever see. But oh the sweetness in the thought that somewhere out there after Rocco was gone would be a boy with finer traits, a boy who would also fear killing and who would yearn for the order and poetry of god’s universe. Rocco and this boy would never know each other and yet they would be closer than any two men could ever be. If he could hold this boy now he would let down his barriers and whisper softly to tell the boy that feeling and thinking deeply were gifts that a man should cherish and of which he should never be ashamed. And the boy would be Rocco’s gift and Rocco would be both the boy and the man fused into one across the generations.

But Rocco saw that this would never come to pass and that the future was closed to him and so he would shut his eyes for another night as the stove flickered and he would dream the restless dreams of a man disquieted by his desire to make sense of himself . . .

Rock awoke suddenly from a dream. His grandfather had been holding him by the hand. They were traveling somewhere, but Rock could not see where. Rubbing away the fear that came from waking abruptly in the night, focusing on the flickering digits of the alarm clock, the dream came back to Rock. Rock remembered that his grandfather had actually been pulling him forward with one hand as he reached out with the other. It was as if Rocco III was reaching for someone else’s hand. But Rock did not know whose hand it was. For the life of him, Rock just could not see who it was that his grandfather was trying to pull into his dream.

Mothermorphosis

As I awoke this morning from uneasy dreams, I found that I had been transformed into a middle-aged Mother. Coming out of sleep and seeking a more comfortable nook in the mattress, I immediately knew that something had gone terrifyingly wrong. My once lumpy, 50 year old body felt smooth against the sheets, frictionless in the way that only a hairless torso can be; and when I grabbed myself between my legs as a groggy man will do to assure himself that his manhood is still intact, I found nothing but a soft pillow of hair which it turned out was the only hair that remained south of my head. And when it came to my head - oh God - besides the massive piles of hair now hanging from my scalp and brushing my collarbone in tawny shades of blond and grey, there were thoughts inside my head that no man I know would have been able to understand or endure had he thought of them.

As God as my witness, my first full waking thought was of buying women’s shoes. Rows of espadrilles and stilettos and pumps, shelves of slender boots and practical mules, all of them ranked and stacked in the windows of shoe stores like soldiers prepared to march into battle for me; and most disturbing of all was that I could not rid myself of the idea that I wanted (no needed) to fondle each and every pair I saw. This initial thought might have been enough to drive a man to jump from a bridge, but then following immediately on the heels of this (if one can stand the pun) I crashed deeper into what I can only suppose is a mother’s day-to-day reality, beginning a succession of thoughts that ranged so fast in my mind and collided so quickly into each other that it was as if an archangel had opened a hundred different boxes of feelings, ideas and activities only to allow them to mix within me and drive me mad. All at once I thought of children and bills and cooking meals and cleaning houses and working in a job I loved . . . or was it a job I hated . . . no, it was a job I loved . . . no, wait, it was ... God, I didn’t know what it was. I thought of driving an SUV too big to control across hundreds of miles as I took my kids to ballet and soccer and music practices. I thought of work meetings interrupted by phone calls where a whining husband complained he could not find his special socks and then of taking a document out of my brief case to present at a conference only to find that it was the math homework my son had desperately thrust upon me to help him finish the night before. I thought of the nearing of menopause and how I had become my own mother (what!?). I thought of endlessly paying bills which blended into ruminations on my children’s chances of getting into a good college which slammed into how I could possibly entertain my husband’s obnoxious, overweight relatives during the holidays with a kitchen that was too small and a new set of knives with which I might be tempted to kill my mother-in-law. On and on it went. All these thoughts came at me multiplying into new thoughts and creating situations and things that needed to be done that could never have possibly existed or be dealt with in the mind of a man.

“So,” I thought, “this is what goes on inside the head of a woman and mother – this is what she must face every day.” Well, if so, no man – no father - could stand it. We men with our little compartments of ideas, each neatly unpacked to think through and carefully consider and perhaps act on before packing it away again and taking the next one from the box. Until now I had seen this methodical way of thinking and doing as manliness. But now I realized that mulling over one thought at a time is pure cowardice compared to how brave a mother must be to bear such torture as had been going on in my head ever since I awoke.

And that was when the unthinkable happened. Before another thought could enter my brain, the door to my bedroom was flung open and in ran “the kids” - my children. Two of them shouting, one of them keening, all three of them yelling, “mom!” I spun desperately in bed to look for my wife so that she might take care of them and then I realized that - oh sweet Jesus - I was my wife. I was the “mom” that this screaming brood was looking for. It was a living nightmare. I had seen these children every day for years, and I had seen what they could do to their mother, and it was terrifying now to consider what they might do to me.

“Happy Mother’s Day,” my simpering 15 year old son shouted at me. “We have breakfast ready for you downstairs,” my oldest daughter clucked with a smile. I was amazed that they didn’t notice anything different about me. When they looked at me they saw only their mother even though I knew that somewhere inside I was still their father. But they didn’t even seem to realize that I was gone. I tried to explain what had happened - to scream - to tell them to go get help quickly. But each time I spoke - no matter what I intended to say - only the words of their mother came out of my mouth.

“I’m trapped inside the body of your mother,” I shrieked inside my head. “Call 911.”

“Breakfast?” the voice of a wife and mother cooed sweetly from my own lips. “That’s amazing – and you made it all yourselves?”

“You have got to be kidding me,” I silently yelled. “Forget about breakfast. What about me?”

“Just give me a minute, and I’ll be down,” the mother in me said loud and clear while the children smiled. “I can’t wait.”

“Can’t you see that I’m not even here,” I squeaked into my own echoing brain as my teen son began to fight with his younger sister. “Don’t you even care that your father missing? Wait . . . is that smoke I smell coming from the kitchen?”

But not only couldn’t my children hear me, they didn’t even seem to miss the fact that their father was gone. Even worse, their mother emerging within me just smiled through it all. My oldest daughter had now gotten into the fight between her younger brother and sister, and the mother I had become didn’t seem to know or care that our house could be burning down or that our daughter was about to punch her brother in the face. The mother that had taken over my body had been hypnotized by the sheer site of our children.

One by one the three children pulled themselves together and lined up to kiss me on my cheek whereupon I surrendered helplessly to each peck and then watched them leave the room. When they were gone, I could still feel the warmth of their kisses on my face and the strangest feeling started to come over me. Even though I was still afraid that the three of them might beat each other senseless while firemen had to be called in to save our burning home, I wanted my children to come back into the room to kiss me - their mother - one more time.

I pulled myself from the bed and went to the mirror. I started to examine the body standing in front of me, peering at the breasts, standing on my tiptoes to peak at my rear end. I took the slender fingers on my hands and began moving them around my figure until I was stoking my neck. “Wow, I was really something,” I mused. I kept caressing myself and was really starting to enjoy it when suddenly I said aloud, “Well ... isn’t this just like a man ...” I gulped, shocked at the words that had just come out of my mouth. “Wait,” I said trembling, “I am a man!”

Either I had just about gone over the edge, or else I was being completely transformed now - body, mind and soul - into the mother of my children. I ran to the closet where the man fading away inside me had kept his suits and pants, shirts and jackets, black and brown loafers and brogans – I felt myself being repelled by the darkness and the mean utility of these clothes, the ponderous way the coats hung, the boat-like size of the shoes, the razor sharp creases on the trousers. I crossed the room to my wife’s closet – my closet – the clothing here sparkled and seemed barely to need the hangers that held them in place in order to float along the bar and wait patiently for delicate hands to choose them. I smiled and, God help me, I twirled myself among the dresses and skirts and blouses.

What came next, I can barely remember. But I do remember this. I walked from the room to the stairs and, starting down the flight that led to our living room on one side and our kitchen on the other, I called out to my children, “Something smells good.” I wanting nothing more now than for my children to come and greet me at the bottom of the landing, no longer thinking about anything other than getting to see my children one more time.

And then, almost as an afterthought, I can remember hearing myself say, “By the way . . . has anyone seen your father?”



(With apologies to Franz Kafka and Philip Roth, and the deepest of respect and a happy (belated) Mother’s Day to all the mothers in our lives.)

Twelve

This is the year, Daddy. This is the year I will turn you inside out and twist your heart into a paper chain that is far too weak to hold me. There will come a moment this year, Daddy, a moment when you’ll ask me for some little bitty simple thing – an agreement to come straight home after school or a promise to finally clean out a closet in my room that is yet overflowing with the flotsam of girlhood – and in that moment I will shock you by staring you down with the purest of womanly disrespect and the darkest of pride, an iron ore sneer of rebellion that will shake you from your furrowed brow to those tired old feet that I will no longer rub for you. You will be the one to look away from our locked eyes, Daddy, and for the first time in our lives you will realize with a dread amounting to the dread of your own mortality that, if I choose to do what I choose to do, there is no way that you can stop me.

To say that I am no longer Daddy’s little girl, is an understatement. In fact, as hard as it may be for you to believe it, I am no longer a girl at all. I have turned (after what will seem like an instant to you, Daddy) into a roiling, independent force of female muscle. So let me explain it to you calmly, Father Dear, in an intelligent voice that befits my newfound power. And in order to begin, let’s start with my body.

If I could, I would blame every whipping edge of my pristine nerve on your stupidity, Daddy. But if you want to know the truth there are potions bubbling inside me that are beyond blame, their effect bordering on the sad irony of a lewd joke told by a group of impotent guys on a fishing trip. Deep in my thyroid, my glands, my nodes and my nodules, flowing secular sprites are laboring with comical abandon in a chemistry lab of estrogenic elements that comprise the boilerplate of my feminine mystery. And if all this sounds poetic, Daddy ... Well, it ain’t. You see, I’m not ready for any of this and right now I’m such a mess that even the family doctor you might want to put in front of me wouldn’t want to touch me with a ten foot scope. These are hormones I’m using to stare you down, Daddy. And though you may have had a hand in making them, you have no way of controlling them. Nobody does. Not even me. With these substances sloshing around my guts and bones I am a preteen chemical weapon that can direct a hypergolic fire of anger, spite and schizophrenic sass at anyone in any place at any time.

Pity the young boys that cross me on the playground this year, Daddy, for they will be left in a quivering heap of hairless jelly. The mass cult march toward younger and younger sexuality may be sharpening my edges, but the blade I use to puree these boys while my army of my girlfriends rifle off text messages at opposing cliques, comes honed straight from the pituitary arsenal where I have been hiding it for centuries. We eat boys whole and alive at this age, Daddy. Towering over this low-riding, skateboarding crop of gangly mutts for the first and only time in our lives, we Amazon princesses giggle with each bite we take from the brim of their ass backwards hats and untucked flannel shirts. We whisper jokes to each other about how their Adam’s Apples loom larger than their own heads and then we leave them behind in a vacuum chamber of their own breaking voices as they attempt to insult us with the sound of words that crack between octaves and ultimately reach us in a weak, squeaky soup of put downs that even our much younger brothers know are as lame as a three-legged pony in a petting zoo. “At least I’ve got something poking out from my body, Patty ...” “If you were any more bowlegged, Chelsea, we could use your legs for goal posts ...” “Why don’t you and your girlfriends go open a farm, Martha, and some of you could be the cows and the rest of you could be the pigs.” Oh my, oh my, you can only imagine how much this hurts us as we girls go off in a power parade of tight tank tops and short skirts to stare at the 20-something guy who flips pizzas over a local lunch counter that all of us fantasize about climbing up onto as we French kiss this grown up pizza hunk on the lips.

Some might tell you not to worry, Daddy. And others might tell you that I will outgrow this. God, there are even a few who will tell you that someday I will turn into a fine young lady. And all that may be true. But right now my advice to you is not to listen to any of them, Father Dear. Because personally I think you should worry. I think you should worry like hell.

To say that I am way ahead of myself at this age is an understatement, Daddy. And everything you think I could be doing, I am capable of doing. You can only hope to hold on long enough and that your arms are strong enough to stave off the rampant desires and orgasmic chaos of my age. Until then, every time you see that group of young teen girls sidling up to those older boys in a parking lot while exhaling the urban myths of birth control along with the smoke from their Marlboro Lites, I’ll be there. Every time, you pull up to a light on a summer day and hear a mother in the minivan next to you screaming at her tween daughter that she is a bitch and that no amount of discipline will save her, just before this mother slaps this girl and then this girl slaps her back, I’ll be there. Every time, you witness a father searching the streets at night with the dome light of his car shining and his face wet with perspiration and a terrified seep of tears as his 14 year old has run away once again, I’ll be there. I’ll be there, Daddy. And I’ll be there. And I’ll be there. Until I come home again to you.

You see, home is where I wanted to be all along, Daddy. But twelve is when I try to burn down your home so that I might someday build my own. And whether I get that chance, Daddy, and whether I can, is largely up to you. Because this fire inside me can either consume us all or - with your deep-set love and care beyond all reason – it can forge me into a woman who will look back on you as the man who led me home again.

So just for fun, Daddy - and as a gift to you before I turn you inside out once again today - flash forward to a time a half a century or more from now. Can you see me, Daddy? Can you see that tired, old woman lying there on a bed, having lived a life past twelve and twenty years, past children and a husband and home of her own, past the jobs and joys and worries of a life well lived, and on into her own days of rest? Can you see her smiling? Well that smile is for the memory of you, Daddy. That smile is you, Daddy, and you alone.

But don’t get cocky just yet, Daddy. Because as of this moment I am still twelve. And as of right here and right now, we still have a very, very long way to go.