Passages from the FBI File on Tara Adams

Photo Credit: Flickr by Cliff

1. March 1, 1983. Our subject, born Tara Kathleen Gordon in 1975, recently came to the attention of the government due to her involvement with a group known only to the Bureau as "Scissilla." We believe this to be a code name for some sort of terrorist organization. Today, an agent engaged the subject in conversation in her third grade classroom, having assumed the guise of a friendly substitute teacher. Tara spoke freely and, in fact, passionately about Scissilla and her beliefs surrounding it and its related worlds (or perhaps, cells), while cantering back and forth and twisting the hem of her dress. (It was noted, by the agent, perhaps irrelevantly, that she was the only girl in her grade not wearing jeans.) Tara claimed that Scissilla exists in a parallel Universe which connects to ours through a magic waterfall. In Scissilla, she claims, everyone lives as a shepherd or farmer and is at peace with the world, practicing no violence. There is though, according to the subject, a neighboring world, Jipsivan, which is currently attacking both Scissilla and its surrounding worlds. Tara believes that "Jipsie" agents are currently at work on Earth and that she, a native of Scissilla, has been reborn here in order to stop them. After consideration, the Bureau believes this issue may be more germane to the field of psychiatry than national security. Due to the seriousness of any charge of terrorist activity, we will, however, maintain a file on Ms. Gordon.


2. August 15, 1994. Tara Gordon again came to the attention of the Bureau today while attempting to board a plane from Boston, having carried a double-edged knife to the security line. This peculiar series of events, which suggest a miscalculation in our previous decision to suspend surveillance of this subject, played out as follows. The nineteen year-old Ms. Gordon approached the TSA personnel at security proffering an elaborately decorated dagger and a polite expression. She explained that she had purchased this item in a store in Ocean Point, Maine for the purpose of giving it as a gift to her boyfriend and had then taken a car and Greyhound bus to Logan Airport, where she and her mother now planned to travel back to the San Francisco Bay Area. It had occurred to her at some point, she illustrated, that perhaps there might be a problem with transporting this knife onto an airplane and, in order to avoid having her baggage seized, decided that the best course of action would be to pack the item in carry-on and then retrieve it, to reveal to the TSA personnel, so that, with her accompanying explanation, they need not be alarmed about her bringing it on-board. However, at the point of her brandishing a dagger illegal in the state of Massachusetts in an international airport, things soured quite suddenly and the authorities were contacted. When agents arrived, in the guise of a small group of Hari-Krishnas, events found Ms. Gordon in tears over the loss of her dagger, which she claimed was a religious item, and the degradation of her character that accompanied this experience. Strange as it may seem, it is this agent's impression that Ms. Gordon was not engaged in a terrorist act, but was instead acting on a sort of ridiculous, unproved faith in the inherent eagerness of the world to understand her intentions. Naturally though, the file will remain open and very limited surveillance will commence, to protect the government's interests.


3.  October 27, 1994. A thorough background investigation into Tara Gordon received today reveals some troubling items. Apparently, there has been some question as to the patriotism and American values of her family going some ways back throughout their history. Her father's family hails, not insignificantly, from Russia, but her mother's family, although not Bolshevik by lineage, is worse. Apparently, Ms.Gordon's maternal grandfather, one A.Powell Davies, longtime Unitarian minister of All Souls Church in Washington D.C., was an antagonist to the government during the years of his peak influence. His FBI file reveals notes stating that Rev. Davies awoke every morning before dawn and worked at a printing press underneath his house, producing Communist propaganda which he would later distribute about the family's neighborhood. (It is noted that his wife, Muriel Davies, was later observed frequently to have said that not only was her husband not a Communist but that he never arose early enough to do anything before dawn.) Evidence of un-American sympathies does not end there, however. Rev. Davies was actively critically from his pulpit, of the activities of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and his church provided gifts of drawing supplies to the children of Hiroshima following the bombing which ended the war with Japan, a clear act of traitor-ship.
   
   His daughter, Bronwyn Gordon, is perhaps even more questionable if somewhat less influential. On no less than seven separate occasion, a note has been made by TSA employees of Ms. Gordon's behavior when passing through security at airports, her presence at the previously mentioned dagger incident notwithstanding. Her comments have included statements such as "Well, did you find an explosive?," "It's not as if I have a BOMB!" and "If you search my disabled client inappropriately, I will call the police!" It seems that Ms. Gordon also lived for a time with her then husband, Tara's father, in a tepee, on some land that did not belong to either of them, in the state of Washington. Both Rick Gordon and Bronwyn Gordon's presence in Berkeley in the Summer of Love is also a damning piece of evidence against them. At this time, both of them were caught up in notions of  "people's power" and it is suspected that they may have consumed illegal street drugs.
   
   Ms. Tara Gordon herself, the new report reveals, was present at the Gulf War protests in the company of a friend who strongly resembled Jesus Christ but was 6'2" and photographed wearing both a Russian ear hat and a pin bearing the hammer and sickle. This friend later joined the Trotskyist Party and remains, we find, an avid Trotskyist to this day. Ms. Gordon herself at this time referred to herself alternately as a utopian socialist, an anarchist and a faery. Clearly, we must keep a close watch on the activities of Tara Gordon. At some point, she will be caught in act of outright terrorism.


4. March 1, 2012. After close to thirty years of observing this subject, we believe it is finally time to close the file on the 36 year-old woman now dubbed Ms. Tara Adams. After what seemed a disturbing trend toward terrorist socialism at a young age, Ms. Adams has settled into bland normalcy in all of her daily dealings, year after tiresome year. It is noted that she has produced three children of unusually troublesome temperament, but this cannot necessarily be construed as a terrorist act. Periodically, Ms. Adams, or her husband–an outspoken Unitarian in the same vein as her grandfather–will make a remark worthy of notation in this file, but no action ever comes of this, and their activities reveal a pattern of soccer games, vegetable consumption and medical appointments. After Ms. Adams began writing her blog, Faith in Ambiguity, in 2010, it slowly became clear to agents studying her that the initial impressions of field envoys in 1983 were correct. Ms. Adams is clearly a case for psychiatry, but not, it seems, for the FBI. As of today, the file of Ms. Adams is officially closed and all investigation into her bizarre activities will cease.

The War on Women Moves into My Duck Yard: a Video Documentary

I must confess that I have lost my cool. Recently, my adrenalin has surged more than once as I have heard the deluge of news detailing exactly how old white men around the U.S intend to make my life more difficult. Apparently, some of their plans include legislation to interfere with my right to obtain contraception that will prevent me from producing hordes more male children with attentional problems, and other insulting things. I promise, though, that I won't go too far in this vein, since I have no intention of researching this post well enough to make a well-reasoned political argument, and I want all of the lovely Catholic women, who offer to pray for me, to continue reading my blog. We all know where I am headed with this, anyway.

I am going to talk about ducks.

While white men with power and influence are bossing women around all over the U.S., white ducks are doing the same thing in my back yard.

In case somehow you didn't already know, we have pet ducks–two males and two females. That is at least one male too many. Let me explain their living arrangements. They have a fenced area of my large back yard, which they have entirely purged of grass. There are two coops built back there, which were intended as ladies and gentlemen's quarters. They choose, however, to sleep in the same one, all together, every night. In the summer, we fill up two or three baby pools in our side yard for them to swim in (and drink from) which need to be replenished with fresh water every day. In winter, when we can't use our hose outlet, they get no ponds and we have to fill large thermoses from our sink and hang them on nails for them to drink. Ducks don't need to swim, they just like to. During this pond-free time, they grow to resemble waddling cotton balls that have been used to clean someone's butt.

We had to turn the water off in late October this fall, five months ago. So yesterday, I looked at my four white ducks, who have been happily sloshing around in puddles of their own feces for the last few weeks, since things have begun to thaw, and decided that they could really use baths. This was how Project Empower the Duck Hens got underway. It began innocuously enough. The hose which extends out to our side yard, where the ducks live, is currently frozen just under the surface of the ground so I had to lug around my good garden hose from out front and use it to fill their turtle sandbox pond.  Naturally, it got all covered with poo. (Duck husbandry is not the romantic avocation you have been led to believe.) Having done this, I decided to sprinkle my oldest duck a little. Usually ducks like this, but today, having seen no hose water since 2011, Aflac had forgotten what it was and decided it was probably battery acid. He ran away, quacking in terror. (I have written his very funny history elsewhere, and you should read it.)

The systematic oppression which I have intimated is going on this mating season is being perpetrated thus: In the video below, please meet Nibbles and Sweet Pea. Currently, Sweet Pea, who is the bustier, larger duck, is being confined to the "non-bedroom" coop by Q-Tip, one of our two male ducks. I believe this is a misguided attempt on his part to compel to produce ducklings, much as the GOP is apparently compelling women to bear young. (Whoops, sorry.) Sweet Pea is laying eggs, but she is doing it only at night, in a separate coop, so he has her sitting all day in a coop on some utterly imaginary eggs, and for this she is denied food and water and, today, a bath. Men.

Observing this situation, my eldest son and I started guarding the pond so the poor girls could take a bath. Here, poor little Nibbles, my runty female with a voice like a squeaky toy, is attempting to get clean when she is rudely chased away from the bath which these asshole males clearly believe is theirs.

Understandably, Sweet Pea was a little too scared to get in, even though Rowan was holding the males at bay. Finally, we got her into the pond (which I couldn't film because of the water and feathers flying everywhere), but the boys escaped and bullied her and her sister back out again.

At this point, we got fed up with the Patriarchy of the Pond. Here you see Rowan, removing the offenders and my youngest, attempting to restore justice to the world. (Note Rowan's coldly delivered scientific explanation of the natural scheme of things and Mikalh's deeply empathetic reaction to the situation. That's my kids, in a nutshell there, in case anyone cares.)

The result of this twenty-minutes-long line drawn in the sand was, basically, that the girls got to bathe at least long enough that they now resemble ducks and not pieces of wadded up cotton stuck to a tush. We couldn't really keep the boys at bay for any length of time. They were hellbent on making sure the girls could not have access to the water, the food or their freedom.

What instinct governs this behavior in male ducks, and male humans, is difficult to say. My assessment is that we must remain forever vigilant, protecting our sisters in their baths from the nefarious attentions of misogynist and power-hungry white drakes, who wish to stand on our backs and crush us, to prevent us from bathing or from leaving our coops.

It takes a village to protect the liberty of one waterfowl. We are all of us, sisters.

The Quackers: From back L:-Sweet Pea, Q-Tip, Aflac. R-Nibbles.

Weirdly, my mother has also written on this subject this week. Apparently my ducks inspire writers in much the same way that that the Madonna inspired painters of the Renaissance. They have their own genre.

The Collected Works of Duck (all on the subject of these particular ducks)

By me

Animal Lover Part II: The Empire Quacks Back
The story of why the Hell I have these pet ducks and how this proves I am crazy.

Animal Lover Part III: The Duck Wars (or Our Adventures in Omnivorous Pet Husbandry)

Why it's OK to kill your pet, as long as it's a duck.

Duck Rental
A business enterprise I am thinking of starting.

By my Mom

I Don't Get It
Humans have a tangled relationship with animals. (Reflections on why her daughter–me–killed the duck.)

Ducks are Not Nice People
Thoughts on why ducks are really not as you have been lead to believe.

Upset: I don't especially like orchids, and I don't like feeling like one.

Back in early December–back before I participated in Reverb Broads, back before I jumped into January's National Blog Posting Month...and then February's National Blog Posting Month...before I knew that every damn month was National Blog Posting Month, my Dad did something wonderful.

He offered to send me to Dayton this April to the Erma Bombeck Writer's Workshop. He did this despite the fact that all I had to show for my "career" as a writer was a silly little vanity blog with a following of friends and acquaintances and a renewed interest in my writing. I had not shown such interest, though, since I was a maudlin teenager punching out short stories that read like Catcher in the Rye soaked in peach Schnapps and abridged for Tiger Beat. Maybe this is what caught his attention.

My Dad believes in me. He has many fine qualities, and this is one of the nicest. Especially when you consider that, in his lifetime, I have done things like have more than one child out of wedlock, change career paths as often as my underwear and become a practicing witch.

Truly, I have done lots of things which have kept both of my poor parents on their toes all these years. It's nice that they still choose to see me in the fond and admiring terms that they do. (My theory is that they have no other children, so they can't really shun me, being the nice people that they are.) 

But I digress.

I think my point was that my dad paid for me to attend this conference. Which is way cool. I get to travel all by myself to a real event. Unlike everything else I attend, this is neither going to be put on by child actors or be mandatory for all church members. The purpose of the whole event is to further my writing "career," and I get to stay there all weekend.

Oh, crap.

It's February now, which is very close to April. There is but one month between them, in fact. I have to go to Dayton by myself. It may irritate many of my readers, but this is somewhat problematic for me. Not that I have never flown alone before. I have. But this time, I have to change planes both ways, get a shuttle to and from the Marriott, and survive a conference all weekend despite my weird new physical limitations. 

Recently, the only way I can sit through church, which lasts one hour, is to have my husband brace the back of my head with his hand the whole time. (I don't think they will let him come with me to do this at the Writer's Conference.) I get cold. I get migraines. I get debilitating cramping. I get mental fog. I am not sure I can sit for an hour and a half at a time–much less hours at a time, whether I will need help if I become really ill, or how the stress of the travel will affect me. 

The worse my symptoms are at any given time, the more I become like a sort of penurious orchid, requiring constant care and maintenance to subsist on a basic level. Any change in temperature, light or humidity could be disastrous for me. Travel requires constant adaptation, something a normal organism does with relatively little effort, but which for myself, the orchid, and various exotic frogs, is terribly troublesome. I do not wish to end up a puddle of decomposing amphibious goop stuck to the bottom of a Delta seat.

I don't especially like orchids, and I don't like feeling like one. My deepest fear, I think, is that I will end up hating the whole experience of the Conference, and that by hating it, I will have disappointed my dad, who had the blind faith to believe in me for no good reason. 

I am not great with taking care of myself. I tend to want to control things, to do things myself, and not to miss out on anything. I have adapted to life with the understanding that Serious Shit is relying on me, and I had better deliver, or there will be Hell to pay for it. This has made managing my chronic illness difficult. My personality is great for being depended on, but not for depending on myself. I'm lousy as Hell at that.

Luckily for me, I have great friends who help me work things out by listening to me in a magical kind of way. This kind of magical listening is so rare and special that hardly anyone can do it. But my friend Amy can. She knows how to listen to me be upset, and just let me be. She doesn't try to fix me, give me advice, shush me, or get me to be positive. She listens to me, but she listens not to the me that is the complainer but to the me that is the commitment that I have. And then she says whatever there is to say. I talked to her for some time about the problem of this conference, she listened magically, I talked some more, and here's what we worked out:

I will take everything in my arsenal–every medication, every pillow, every strategy to get me through. I will have it be OK to take breaks, even if I have to miss things. I will rest if I need to rest. I will make my well-being the number one priority of the whole adventure. I am going to get something fabulous for my writing from being there. The place will be jam-packed with excellent humor and human interest writers, so I can't fail to garner some gems of wisdom.

But, if I can get through the upset to my system and still take care of my body and soul, that will be an even larger victory for me. That would be worth the whole damn trip.

Upset. This post is supposed to be a reflection on upset.

Upset can wrap my stomach in knots, give me heart palpitations like a rabbit with an aspirin overdose, sour the flavor of an entire day. Some upset I just don't know how to resolve. But upset can also be an opportunity because I am lucky enough to have friends that can examine it with me, as if entering a cluttered room together, where they help me sort out the contents of my emotions, separating the usable from the waste.

If bravery lives inside of fear, then transformation lives inside of upset.

Animal Lover Part I: The Saga Begins

I originally published this post back in December of 2010, when no one read my blog but my parents and my pet cat. It is actually pretty good. But it is very long. So, with a nod to Star Wars, I am breaking it into a trilogy and re-publishing it. Enjoy!

When I was a small child, I had a habit of acquiring various animals, with or without the explicit permission of my parents. Mainly, this took the form of cats. For instance, when I was about six, I adopted a grey and white Persian-mix female cat who came to the front doorstep. I called her Pretty Paws (because my best friend had a cat named Pretty Paws already and six-year-olds rarely consider originality a real virtue).

Over the years, this particular cat brought my family great joy and amusement through her various activities, which included hurling herself from the pear tree in our back yard onto the screen door, where she remained for as long as it took for someone to arrive and let her in the house. Later on, after we had moved twice and the cat's mental acuity was perhaps somewhat dimmed, she took to spending long hours sunning herself on the roof of our rented house. For reasons which may have included feline arthritis or perhaps early signs of Alzheimer's, Pretty Paws did not feel the need to leave the roof in order to relieve herself, so, unfortunately, when we vacated our Tiburon house, its roof remained peppered with fossilized cat turds, scattered proportionately across its surface. Such was her legacy.

Photo by Jamie Guimond Productions

Still later, this cat took to talking to herself in the middle of the night, specifically saying in what appeared to be a Japanese accent "Herrrrrooo! Hoar are rou?" I have found a helpful video on YouTube to allow you to picture this more easily.

However, I was unable to find a cat that really approximated the creepy phantasmagoric horror movie quality my cat brought to this project. I guess, take what I've given you and imagine the same thing done by a straggly, emaciated cat hiding behind the half-closed door of a nearby room at 2 a.m., with a voice like a throat cancer victim.

Without boring you with unnecessary detail, I will say that my animal acquisitions over the years have included unauthorized teddy bear hamsters; schizophrenic tabbies; two rabbits, which I attempted to "housetrain" unsuccessfully and keep inside the house uncaged; and an enormous homemade bottomless rat castle with five rats whom I had bred myself, and which I kept in my parents' kitchen after I moved out.

Surprisingly, adulthood has not really stopped me from continuing this practice. At the age of thirty-five, I still experience a sort of glee when reminding myself that no one can actually STOP me from acquiring whatever animal I want (unless you ask my husband, anyway). At one point, when living under the trees in the redwood forest of Sonoma County, I had six cats, many of whom had been born under my house. This, to be fair, was not my fault, since neither the mother nor father cat were mine to spay or neuter. However, rather than finding homes for these accidental kittens, I naturally adopted all of them, including those with unrepentantly feral and occasionally vicious tendencies. Three of these were matching long-haired ginger tabbies, one of whom, Marmalade Lion, I still have.

For another case, when first visiting Santa Fe on an eight-week summer pilgrimage as a newly single mother with two young children, I returned home on my 1,000-mile car trip with a baby field mouse that required careful nursing multiple times a day with a dropper full of specialized formula.

Photo by Jennifer Jordan

Really, this could happen to anyone.

One doesn't simply turn away from an infant field mouse which fell from some random stranger's ceiling in a state which is marked by the occasional but persistent presence of bubonic plague outbreaks. Not merely because you are about to drive for four days with two children under the age of seven, and plan to visit the Grand Canyon and Knott's Berry Farm. The mouse, Thimble, accompanied us to various restaurants, theme parks, and historical points of interest, and especially enjoyed the log ride. My good friend, Merisha, kept him safe inside her bra throughout most of the trip.

So, anyway, if I skip a few interesting points for the sake of attention span, that brings me to the present. Our current circumstances are not totally unreasonable. We have only one dog, which we ended up with while shopping at Lowe's in Espanola four years ago. He seems to be part Corgi and part lab. Imagine a low rider Labrador Retriever. Or a lab with dwarfism and large ears like a donkey. I still have Marmalade Lion, who is a sweet cat with an unfortunately nerve-wracking meow and a tendency to extreme paranoia. I am currently borrowing two additional cats, Gui and Gubal, for the length of a year while my friends, their owners, are living in Slovenia.

And then there are five ducks....

You'll have to read my next post to find out about them. (Do you like the way I provided a hook? My writing is like crack. Come back later and get more. Just a little more. It totally won't hurt you at all.)

I went shopping on Fourth Avenue in Tucson and decided my son can go to college there because they have newspaper stands that look like robots.

This is my son Rowan. 

Rowan is smart. We are pinning a lot of our hopes for the future on him because he can do math, as well as vacuum and unload the dishwasher. 

We figure this more or less qualifies him for just about anything he wants to do. The sky's the limit. 

And once he makes it good in the world, he can take care of us.

Right now, he is fourteen and in eighth grade. So, he is pretty much only interested finding places in conversation to say "That's what she said." and setting things on fire. 

But you can see that potential just simmering underneath everything he does. (Like telling "That's what she said" jokes but with impeccable grammar and reading comics, but comics based on Greek myths, that kind of thing.)

I think a lot about his future, mainly since mine is already pretty much botched, and I would like to be able to send him to a good college. 

In order to fulfill on this, the method I am currently employing is to check his grades online repeatedly and question him about every mistake he has made so that the prospect of failure becomes a sort of unlivable disaster in his mind. This is what is called positive reinforcement. 

It is a very powerful parenting technique. You should try it. As a result of my approach, my son has very high grades and will probably kill me in my sleep before he ever graduates high school.

Anyway, as I've said, I was recently in Tucson, Arizona, visiting my extended family. On the last day before we had to depart, my two oldest kids had already flown home to spend Thanksgiving with their dad, and my husband, my youngest son and I had dropped my father and his girlfriend off at the airport and were looking for some place to act like tourists. Primarily, I wanted to buy a spoon that said "Tucson" so that when I am an old lady, I can have a wall covered with an array of tacky spoons to prove that I once left my house.

We ended up visiting Fourth Avenue, which is the hip college area of Tucson. I was just looking to kill a few hours and find a spoon, but based on my findings, I have decided that Rowan can go to college there. 

I haven't actually seen the actual University of Arizona, nor do I know if they have any programs that will be of interest to my son, when, four and a half years from now, he graduates high school. I can't afford the out-of-state tuition, either, but a little debt never hurt anyone anyway. Stay with me, though, because THIS is what the newspaper machines look like:

We looked around for several hours and entered various stores. I shopped for a long time because choosing a college for your fourteen year-old is an important decision which requires a lot of browsing. Some of my additional findings were:

Awesome garbage cans!

A communist coffee shop. Every good college town needs one.

Excellent pop culture stores with cool signs. 

A hydroponic store for growing "vegetables".

A nearby hookah lounge for smoking "vegetables".

(I am not trying to promote drug abuse. I have not smoked "vegetables" for the last nineteen plus years. I am just documenting the fact that there was a hookah store. I associate hookahs with Alice in Wonderland. That's because I'm so geeky highly literate. I figure if there are hookah stores, there may also be walking chess sets and talking eggs. It just seems logical.)

A mural depicting dead hippies on the wall at a major intersection.

This is some seriously bad-assed shit. AND, as if that's not enough,  you can buy your own mason jar wine glass in a store there!

So, the upshot is that what I really want is for my son is to go to a school where he can grow marijuana, become a sort of New Edition Beatnik and then drop out to join the Communist Party. All so I can go visit a place that makes me feel like I am still sixteen and shopping on the Haight, except without as many people trying to sell me acid (probably just because I'm with the six year old).

I can hardly wait to come visit him there. It solves all of our college problems! It's close enough to drive. We can make sure our relatives keep on eye on him and I can save up until I have enough money to buy a complete set of mason jar wineglasses (you know, for when we have company). We don't drink wine, but we can use them for grape juice, or perhaps, cooled mint tea sweetened with a hint of organic agave nectar (since we can't even drink juice these days, either). 

I've looked into it online and I think, if Rowan continues to get good grades, they may accept him at an in-state rate.  But if you say anything to him, please don't mention the hookahs. 

I'm trying not to be a bad influence.

Today all you get is this buffalo.

So, I just came back from Tucson, Arizona. I didn't tell you before I left, so that you wouldn't break into my house and steal all my dirty laundry and vintage garage sale furniture while I was gone. No hard feelings.

This is southern New Mexico as seen through the cracked windshield of my 2000 Dodge Caravan. It doesn't look much better without the crack and thumbprints, actually.

I went to Tucson with my husband and kids to be present at my Grandpa Hy's funeral. He died, at the age of 101, on the Ides of March, but we waited til as many family members as possible could be together to put him to rest as befit the final remaining member of his generation, and then stay to spend Thanksgiving together.

My Grandpa Hy, a force of Nature.

Anyway, the story of this trip has three parts:

In Part 1, my family and I get ready to travel and then take a twelve hour road trip to Tucson, during which time I have ample time to reflect on how truly weird we all are.

In Part 2, we say a final goodbye to Grandpa. I get to know this part of my family better. This is sort of a trip to the Homeland for me. This generates many reflections on Why I Am the Way that I Am.

In Part 3, I visit Fourth Avenue near the University of Arizona and decide that my son can go to college there because they have cool trash cans. Wait. They are really cool. This is a really good way to help your children make important decisions about their future.

Then we drive back through some of the most godforsaken parts of America, and arrive home again, after being fascinated by very strange statues in the middle of Nowhere.


So, there are my next three blog posts. But today, all you get is this buffalo, who, despite being made of pure silver, is destined to spend his life behind a chain link fence in Hatch, New Mexico, overshadowed by a giant man who is about to eat an RV.

The economy has really been hard on a lot of us.