-Eugene Baldwin's – The Genehouse Chronicles

August 28, 2014

Fox News commentator Sean Hannity was shot to death in New York City today by a black police officer. Hannity, who had been pulled over on a routine traffic violation, was discovered to have Strawberry Twizzlers that he had shoplifted from a local candy store.

Hannity allegedly got out of his car and asked the officer, Tyrone Jones-Jones-Brown of 2626 Ebony Lane in Harlem (wife Jemma, and children LJ and MJ, 7th and 8th grades, Roosevelt Middle School, 212-666-6666, cell phone 212-999-9999, back door not locked), if he, the officer, knew who he, Hannity was. The officer said, “Yes, you apostate from the deepest depths of hell,” and shot Hannity six times, counted to three and shot the Fox star four more times.

“This murder of white males has got to stop,” Ronald Caucasian, president of NAWPPY (National Association of White Police Patrol Yes!), said. Continue reading →

August 17, 2014

We got our first black and white television when I was six, in 1954. The very first image the family saw was of George Reeves, as “Superman.” He killed himself. That was the beginning of me losing my faith.

I was never drawn to sitcoms but I was laser-focused on Sid Caesar and his crowd of manic comics and the great Jack Paar, particularly when his guests were the intellectuals Jonathan Winters and the astounding Oscar Levant.

August 13, 2014

My wife Barbara and I had just broke up. We both were relieved—so I thought. I had to find an apartment and regroup. My friend Marmie was staying the winter with her son Bill, in suburban Lake Forest. Why didn’t I live there until I could get on my feet? So, from bustling Chicago, to staid and fancy Lake Forest. I lived in Marmie’s mother’s old bedroom.

Fall was cold; winter was brutal. After a lifetime of controlling my dark moods, I surrendered to them. I thought about death. And divorce—divorce was worse than death—the spouse was alive. My ex visited the Lake Forest house several times. We were intimate over and over again, clutching one another with utter closeness. It was a strange time.

On her last visit, my ex told me she was pregnant, from a guy she was seeing; she had to marry him. We lay on my bed, held each other and cried for two hours. And then she was gone.

I stopped coming out of the bedroom. Marmie left meals on the hallway floor. She would knock and say, “I love you.”

I decided to die. Continue reading →

August 7, 2014

This part of the Mississippi River Valley has some of the richest soil on earth. Look on a topographical map and read its designation: The American Bottom. Drive south along Route 3, parallel to the river and gaze on the immense flat, black plains, the rich soil heavily infused with limestone.

The Cahokia Mounds builders knew it. Theirs was the first organized agricultural community in pre-history. Calhoun peaches know it (Georgia, thy charlatanic peaches pale next to ours) and so do Poag watermelons and blueberries and blackberries and the best-tasting tomatoes in the country.

And there is another type of American Bottom—or should I say bottoms.

She walked into the café, her eyeballs honed in on her smart phone, and ordered something to go, without even looking at her waitress. She might have been seventeen, might have been a volleyball player. She was blond and tall and lithe, and her bluejeaned American Bottom was beautifully rounded and muscular and just slightly bouncy. Continue reading →

July 31, 2014

“Oh, the waning days of July, me building glider planes from apple crates and wire—my father was a produce man. Never mind, glider could not glide. Prop that plane on a limestone ledge of the Ohio River and push it off, and crash into the water, the crates coming apart. I remember lying on a sandbar and looking at the sky. And I knew my destiny. I would fly, like a bird.” “Wild Bill” Thompson, Colonel, the Tuskegee Airmen.

This, morning, there was no breeze—the cotton candy smoke from the coal-fired power plant rose straight up—and the Mississippi was riverglass, and lining the Scotch Jimmy Island shore were thirty pelicans and great egrets and snowy egrets and blue herons— sixty if you counted their reflections in the rivermirror. If you regularly read my essays, you know I count reflections. Continue reading →