Paul Haeder: There is revulsion in some of the revolutionaries’ hearts living and fighting out there, and some of us just have to take matters in our own hands: confront the sexual assaulters, the abusers, in the streets, in their places of business, their workplaces, their restaurant haunts, on their driveways!
Terminal Velocity—A Man Lost of Tribe
What is a life, revealed? What is this idea of truth, the unadulterated history in one's narrative? The baggage, the contexts, the points of view, dredged into one's psychological state, all the trauma of simple moments in a boy's or man's life, boy-to-man and man-to-boy sense of things, are these parts of the lens one should focus in a process of a looking backward (writing it) and then forward to draw lessons learned and still to be revealed (as an organized, somehow, autobiography)?
Is it important for someone like me to write a “biography” even at all without the pedigree of “someone who's big, still rising, haven risen and/or now fallen from grace,” or in this case the anti-autobiography of a simple man, Willy Loman sort of teacher, even without a bone of celebrity in my body?
The body of this long-form writing is a 30-part “series” possibly distilled into fictional fusions—captured life moments, galvanized to the heart of seeing creatively in a pretty messed up world. I believe this to be one of the most gut-flooding truth seeking to some of us, painted characters and landscapes, conflicts, yet the dog of the lamentation, those roses that shed blood, tears from the prickly pear, the ghost inside cenotes.
Full Preface Here
Paul Haeder
As World Burns, Half US Population Chronically Ill . . .
Paul Haeder: This is a time of same sides of the coin of the realm: the conservative and the liberal, the War-Mongering Democratic Party drooling at the McCain fiasco and the Sycophantic Zio-Christo Republicans confused about who is going to own what while scampering away like rats into the alleys as the headlights of their narcissist-in-chief blowtorches the world.
Americans Are as Spacey as Ever
Paul Haeder: A hothouse planet, chronic disease, terminal war, humaneness on the decline, perpetual fire while fiddling with Facebook.
When an Alien Is Our Brother, Son, Friend
Paul Haeder: Lindstrom’s film is powerful on many levels, notwithstanding the filmmaker’s ability to ply through the historical record to humanize this interesting and buoyant son who was known around Portland for many years.
Semper Fidelis or Das Kapital Uber Alles: From Eisenhower to Trump!
Paul Haeder: The men and women I work with now, after a cavalcade of careers under my belt, are wounded soldiers, sometimes wounded warriors, and many times wounded children – both the inner child and the literal children of soldiers.
I Went to Flagstaff for a Commencement
Paul Haeder: Consumerism as a psychological wedge to allow for the synchronized event horizon of finance-government-surveillance-media-military to work on the masses as a suffocating fog pumped out across the globe by an elite bent on total dominance.
Heroes and Villains: The Daily Show in a Homeless Shelter
Paul Haeder: He is the leader of the pack, sad-sack of a playboy and land baron, thief, who gets the book deals, TV contracts, cameos in movies, his brand plastered all over Madison Avenue – make no bones about it, Trump is America.
The Face of Whiteness, Face of a World Burning
Paul Haeder: I just get tanked out sometimes, working my ass off as a social worker, getting food stamp wages while spinning my intellectual and emotional gearwork to save people, and then to be surrounded by checked out white folk.
In the Eye of the Crow
Paul Haeder: How can you not wake up, look in the mirror, and be angry? Really angry at the state of the world, at the state of inequities, at the state of billionaires capturing our souls by the gigabytes to the 1,000th power, billionaires foreclosing on our jobs, our schools, our communities, our safety, health, sanity?
When Armistice Day and Remembrance Day Turned into War Day
Daily, now that I am back off the dole and working as a social worker for homeless veterans, the Make America Great aging and down and out veterans are floundering minute by minute to find stability. That’s health, housing, any safety net or blanket.
The Art of Healing – Looking Back But Never Conceding Space
Paul Haeder: It’s almost impossible for me to go anywhere, participate in anything, whether going out to eat, hitting a movie, driving, or taking this innocuous tour without seeing the faults of capitalism, i.e. the predatory, inefficient, shallow, extremely violent psychologically and structurally, this for-profit-at-all-costs world is.
Whitey on the Moon and Other Gil Scott-Heron Tidings
Paul Haeder: The world of social work is about firings, burn out, low-low pay, humiliation, social worker bosses like Junior Apprentices, and, then, adios, sucker
Creative Juices in a Time of Commodification, Watered Down Drivel, Nothingness of American Fiction
Paul Haeder: Get this, though – I’m going on age 61, and the last time I attempted hawking a novel was 2001, when I ended up moving from El Paso to Spokane. Odd feeling indeed, in 2001, giving up the quest. I still wrote/write, still published/publish, but not books.
