Life As A Movie

I thought it was my movie, this one I’m in, as the aw shucks / gulp, good guy who discovers the cure for all that ails us / negotiating a peace among tribes / the one where I’m improvising on tenor sax /dancing on walls / singing duets with my leading lady.... oops, wrong movie.

For now, I’m just a second banana, better than an extra, but still just a minor bit player bearing witness to the debacle, not the sheriff leading a posse but the guy who ducked in the barroom brawl while the card sharp and cattle rustler took over the town and headed out to the hanging tree.

But wait, we are all stars in our own movie. Here I am now in the Resistance, posing as a ninety-two-year-old retired pharmacist by day but an urban guerilla in the Underground by night sending coded messages in dusted frappuccinos or embedded in everything bagels. Who knows the moles in Musk’s closet? I’ll never tell.

The third act is being written on the fly. The lynch mob will be met by the heartland which finally gets the serious joke on them. Dissent breaks out. The first ones now are soon to be last. Joe the Plumber will get the word that he’s gone from a New Deal to a Fair Deal to a Raw Deal. It is my movie again.

For the gangsters in the palace, the jigs up. Lay down your algorithms, the citadel is surrounded, come out with your hands up.  The carefully scripted rampage of chaos has been exposed as the funeral of our country. Not a single edict issued addresses the lot of the aggrieved. MAGA gripes will become mega-grief as they see they've been thrown under the bus.... until a lightbulb goes on over their collective heads.

Poets will legislate. (Men have been dying for lack of it.) People will migrate as they always have. I’ll have written my own letter of transit. I am shouting on the rooftops of my keyboard.

Before the credits roll, there are flashbacks to those early years when I had all the answers in my back pocket. Simplistic truth had me in the dark till I let in question marks. The musical score modulates between doubt and exclamation points. The camera finds me in close-ups, the soft skin inside my fist, open head, open heart. The camera doesn't lie.