Ray, my man, my future man, my centennial man, you did it. You actually did it.

Assuming you’re still well within your cognitive capacities and you don’t need help wiping your own keister, it’s been a remarkable life. You made it, having raised someone else’s kid as your own, and look at him, the fruits of your labors, the devotion of your highest principles, no matter that awful period of time in his formative years. Look at what he’s achieved with his own life. How prouder of that boy now man can you be? Every time you hear the lines of Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song,” doesn’t it automatically summon sweet memories of the kid learning it on his own and raising himself out his own ruts?

You broke hearts, you lost friends and family in the process, and yet, look at what you brought to yourself in your second marriage and the rebirth of your life. You not only gained the loyalty of your son for never giving up on him, you not only replaced what you lost trifold with new family and friends, you found the love of your life, man. Not many people are so fortunate to be able to say they’ve loved on the deepest plane a couple can share. You gave yourself–all of yourself–to TJ, and what a beautiful marriage it was! She was your partner all the way through, even at the bottom of pint glasses on that life-changing first date, closing down an Irish pub, An Poitin Stil, on a Sunday night. You both fell in love on instant, and what a life you two built together.

Look at what you achieved on your own through fitness until you couldn’t do it any longer. You devoted yourself, you bettered yourself, you discovered your flaws and weaknesses and sought to change them when you found them or others delicately shared them with you. You always lived by a code of open-mindedness to all walks of life and cultures and you tried so many life-enriching things! Your friend set was, and still is, beautifully diverse, the sign of enlightenment you preached in silence most of your life. You cultivated your body and your mind and not everything was a win, but many of it was. You had the gift of appreciating that which life and the divine gave you and you making it to 100 years? Dude, you’ve been so blessed and I know you’re sitting there, feeble you may be, ready to join the Lord and Lady, to finally hug Anubis in person and to tackle Bast and Sekhmet in their feline avatars for their continuous graces. Likewise, to thank Christ in person for being there from birth to your untold end.

You were a writer, Ray, one who sometimes doubted himself, who sometimes writhed in quiet agony when the rejections and the obtuse “California no’s” piled on. You were an A-lister heavy metal and punk rock journalist and you rubbed elbows with most of the heroes you loved in your teens. You wrote many stories, some of which were appreciated, some ignored, but you gave yourself to your craft, knowing how much it hurt writers half your age had the faster track or were simply more advanced than you at the time. You never gave in to the boiling anger. You threatened to quit, but you had a woman who believed in you and read all of your work with the courage to criticize, even when you both didn’t see eye-to-eye. You both had different views on writing, but you loved each other enough to push your brands and to get yourselves out there, even as a tag-team at signing events.

I reiterate; TJ is a love well-earned and lived. You did the right thing, for your son, for your former spouse and also for yourself, no matter the initial pain of it. It was short-lived, because TJ was sent to you within months of being on your own as you are no doubt right now. She made you rise up. She refused to let you fizzle out, even all those years ago. She revitalized you. Your wedding was a magickal fairy tale to a Bohemian princess and I know if you’re having trouble remembering details at age 100, all you need do is look at those old photos. Remember how it poured all day and yet, everyone still came to the ceremony? A Wiccan ritual with a Christian overture to it, one your guests raved over. The gods and goddesses blessed you immensely.

However long you may have from this point forward, Ray, know you touched people as you have been touched. The ancestors have been watching and waiting and are jealous of your endurance, as they cannot wait to embrace you as much as commend you. To the final end, Ray, make your remaining time worthy of a defiant Godzilla roar, because that’s who you were and have always been. Godzilla with a conscience. You’d rather people hear and see your glory instead of wreaking havoc, though you did that very thing a few times in your life. Repent your sins one last time and then forgive yourself. It’s been a good life, a worthy life.

Above all, love yourself as you did everyone who was touched by you, past and present. Your son is your greatest triumph. Your stepchildren are superb, beautiful and righteous and above all, true to themselves. Give them all your best smile as often as you can. They won’t have you forever.

Your are loved, Ray, and you did a damned fine job. The best compliment you ever got, and it was given three times, is the Yiddish phrase, “mensch.” You knew the magnitude and the responsibility that comes with. Never forget it to your final breath.

I love you, old man. You nailed this whole life thing to the sheets.

Ray 2024

If it were in my power to purge, cancel, ban, whatever you want to call it, one word from lexicon, it would be the “n” word.

As a Caucasian man, I’m the least qualified person based on race to comment on this, many of you may say. However, sitting outside the zone, I posit the “n” word is the most obnoxious, degrading and unwelcome term in the English language.

Swapping an “a” for “er” does not take the power back from hatred, as conventional thought has alarmingly force-fed into our current society. I offer an alternate view and invite you to take it or leave it. I’m a minority in my opinion, so much my mixed-race son understands and respects my outlook and censors himself in my company but would just as soon see me “get over myself.” My rebuttal has always been and always will be, I will not bow in my convictions on this subject.

What would Malcolm X, Dr. King, Baynard Rustin, Rosa Parks, Huey P. Newton or Ella Barker, who loved their race so much they risked all to stoke a justful uprising say right now? How could any of them stomach the reek of a modern society flaunting a despicable word amongst its own, for which said freedom fighters and civil rights figureheads gave their lives to be rid of? A word carrying such divisive ridicule, shame and degradation it licensed racists of the world to go unchecked until the 1960s. Blood spilled, martyrs made, yet that goddamn word still lingers deep into the new millennium. No matter how you rebrand it, the “n” word is still venom.

For all the progressions we’ve made in America, we’ve regressed three steps backwards as racism continues to lurk in certain pockets of our country. One reason is not only from a pass-down of bigotry between hate-mongering generations, but the inexcusable pushing of the “n” word as street (and now mainstream) orthodox. Richard Pryor was flagrant of dropping the full monty “n” word for comedic purposes during the 1970s, but nowadays, you can’t get away from the “a” connotation in this era’s (or the 1990s, for that matter) hip-hop, rap, entertainment and sports communities. Dropped between friends, enemies, even non-acquaintances, it’s shameful and as dumb as white folk exchanging amongst themselves, “Waddup, my honkey?”

Worse are the discussions I hear over who gets a free pass to use the “n” word in other cultures and walks of life, based on street-level worth. It’s gotten so out of control, I’ve heard youngblood gangstas, rappers, athletes and comics not only toss out the “n” word in equal increments as f-bombs and doofus-minded, horndog sexism (where’s Queen Latifah to bark in protest “Who you calling a bitch?”), but to claim white rapper Eminem (one of the greatest of all-time, to be sure) has the open invite to use it without leading to fisticuffs. As Cris Carter used to say on ESPN, C’mon, man.

Long and short, friends, the “n” word as it’s used today, does its own community a tremendous disservice. It shows a communal disrespect for both its heritage and its contemporary culture. It tells the racists of the world a large percentage operates under a disturbingly brainwashed acceptance of deprecatory self-loathing. The J. Edgar Hoover Administration infiltrated sectors of urban California six decades ago, pumping drugs and guns into oppressed hellholes they became. The brutally honest 1990s films Boyz ‘n the Hood and Menace II Society were not celebrations of gang life and its “n” word-huffing nihilism; they were caveats of Hoover’s slum-created poisoned well carrying on in destitution and self-deprecation. If anything, “gangsta” has gotten worse and even more dangerous today, hitting not only the inner cities of every major American metropolis, but well past their suburbs. The so-called reclamation of the “n” word is one reason why.

The longer the “n” word prevails in modern culture amongst its own populace, the racists continue to win.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

Fajitas!

Years ago, my mother gave me a Christmas present that has paid dividends for more than a decade. A fajita grill, which has become more a therapy tool than a cooking gadget. I am so attached to my fajita maker it was one of the few things I was unbending with TJ when we first moved in together. We often joke how she’d initially sneered at my fajita maker until I made her a batch during our dating years. My son was already accustomed to my fajitas and told her she’d change her mind after tasting the output.

Granted, the grill looks a little silly, if festive, but in the past, I’d made my fajitas for many friends and family after they’d seen my numerous posts on social media cooking them. I may not compete with an authentic Mexican restaurant, but the love I put into my fajitas has translated into happy customers, including TJ, who relented and, moreover, made sure we had special storage spots for the grill in both places we’ve lived together. Even to the point she now wraps my grill up with TLC after it’s been cleaned up.

I’m most likely to make fajitas on a Friday or Saturday night, usually for my little family who look forward to them as much a I love making them. I take great joy in cutting peppers (sometimes onions and jalapenos), chicken and shrimp and with everyone leaving me to my work, it’s about a 2 hour process in which I enjoy a cocktail while prepping, blending my marinades and cooking. It’s an opportunity for me to decompress from a busy week and I get a kick when our cats lurk back and forth in the kitchen, rubbing my legs and sniffing the mixes wafting in the air.

I’m happy to say most time I fire up my fajitas, there are no leftovers, save for maybe a small pinch of grilled peppers, which get repurposed into salads or on top of burgers. Waste not, especially what comes off my grill! The most satisfying part to making fajitas, aside from the looks of content from my family, is that blazing hissssssssss by the time I get the marinated chicken on there. 

Thank you, Ma, for years of fajita bliss! 

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

It was a shared computer with my ex-wife, acquired from Best Buy back in 1997. We were only two years married, in our second place, a duplex with baseboard heating and window unit a/c. Barely a step up from the moldy, bug-infested 2nd floor apartment we’d begun our time together inside an old Civil War-era house on the west side of Westminster, Maryland. The duplex had well water which left blue rings around our tub and the winters were especially brutal from the down winds. A tornado had ripped through the valley in which we were positioned, skipping over us by a miracle and touching down in a rural subdivision less than a mile down the road. As with everyone and every path taken, humble beginnings.

With very few dimes to rub together and minimal credit allotted at our twenty-something ages, Best Buy offered us a hot deal (so we’d thought) an Apple Power Macintosh G3 233 Desktop unit. Brand spanking new, an operating system now primitive, but for the times, a sparkly third-gen 233 megahertz processor stuffed with 34 megabytes of RAM, a 4 gig hard drive and a 512K backside cache.

We opened an account with Best Buy and, having been pushed by friend testimonials to go Mac instead of Dell back then, especially with my writing aspirations, we took one home, $1,400.00 deeper in the hole than when we’d arrived. Funny enough, I’d added Rush’s Test for Echo, a double-pack of The Cramps’ Songs the Lord Taught Us and Psychedelic Jungle and some techno mix CD to the purchase. Somehow I remember that anecdote down the minute details.

I can’t honestly say either of us were terribly happy with the Macintosh G3 233 and we quickly learned why the unit was discontinued nine months after its release in November of 1997. My ex used to play a lot of games on the Mac and I did too, Solitaire being our go-to. The few CD Rom games we bought for the Mac were a horrid disaster for loading and screen transitions. 

To the good, I wrote a ton of short stories, then 27 going on 28, usually in the evenings after work or right after Saturday morning cartoons loaded with Animaniacs, Pinky and the Brain and the Batman and Superman animated shows. The Mac processor had its own internal 3.5 inch disk drive for storing all those tales which went nowhere and you can read a prior post of mine about those disks and what I found on them last year after ordering a new portable disk reader. The majority were written in these Mac days. The crunches inside the Mac were even more comical to think upon versus the whirring chunks of the portable reader.

The biggest pisser to Macs back then, and you know where I’m going if you owned one back in the day, is those confounded system errors and crashes, and Susan Kare’s taunting bomb icon which accompanied them. Seemed like Kare’s bomb had more onscreen time than actual processor applications. I often lost data not being able to save in time before the damned bomb struck. We lost an entire budget in process with the bomb blowing a digital raspberry at us more than an actual detonation. In other words, the Mac we’d put ourselves in hock for was a total P.O.S. Paying that bill down for a fritzed processor which ultimate froze to death in less than a year positively chapped my ass.

I never went back to Macintosh, despite so many of my colleagues and writer friends back then leaning on me to have a second go, especially when I proposed putting together my own ‘zine. Layouts being one of the Mac’s bragging rights over standard word processors of the day. It became a hard “no.”

Considering what Apple has engineered in modern times, sure, their products have become more reliable–genius level–even if my current wife, TJ and I get ridiculed for being droid instead of iPhone owners everywhere we go. Perhaps it’s a latent thing, with me, anyway, since if I ever see that goddamn bomb icon again, I’m likely to haul whatever device triggered it against the nearest brick wall.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.