A Scarlett Blue Christmas

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The holidays were always my favorite time of year. The bulk of my most significant positive personal events have happened in other times of the year, but yet, the holidays were always special. I'm a thinker, so even as a child, I thought extensively about the reasons why. Like most things, when something is your FAVORITE, there are many reasons for it, not just one or two.

I love beautiful things, and so I love that during he holidays, we decorate the world. Whether it is Halloween decorations, or Thanksgiving harvest displays, or Christmas decorations. The world is more colorful, more brightly lit. It is well established now that our environment impacts our mood and behavior. During the holidays, there is just a different, more positive vibe that most people display. People are friendlier, they smile more, strangers greet each other.

What perhaps plays into this is that during the holidays, people are also spending more time with the people they love, so of course, they are going to be happier and feel better. In our culture, we joke about painful family holiday dinners and disastrous road trips, but in reality, we all look forward to the time of year when things slow down, and whatever issues we might have with our families, it's usually better than the issues we have with Bob at the office...or the issues Bob at the office has with us.

The whole “War on Christmas” thing always seemed stupid and contrived to me. I know a lot of Jewish people. None of them has ever expressed to me being bothered by people saying Merry Christmas, or the general prevalence of the Christmas holiday in American culture. Though I can imagine it isn't a joke a Jewish person would tell in public, I can say it and I can't imagine it hasn't been said by Jews behind closed doors: “Go ahead. You are celebrating the birth of a Jewish man after all.”

I think the idea that there was any substantial number of non-Christians who were against the Christmas holiday was cooked up by conservative media to feed the Christian persecution myth/paranoia. Hell, the holiday season was the BEST time to be an American, and I think people from whatever culture felt this and recognized it.

It's funny, but for years, I've felt that liberal American Jews embodied true Christian values better than most self-proclaimed Christians did. This really makes sense when you consider the story of Jesus from an in-depth theological AND historical perspective. Although some of his ideas were radical, a large part of Jesus' message was that he was calling for a return to certain Jewish values that had been lost through the centuries of musical chair occupations of Judea. Romans basically took a superficial structure of Judaism and turned it into a religion that is CULTURALLY pagan. The positive cultural values that we associate with Christianity—compassion, generosity, courage in the face of moral adversity, forgiveness, atonement—these are all traditional Jewish values long preceding Christianity. Jesus exhibited these values and cared about them because he was a Jew and never repudiated his Jewishness. The Last Supper was a Jewish Passover meal.

On the contrary, the NEGATIVE cultural values that we associate with Christianity: efforts at world domination, the “kill em all and let God sort them out” justification for violence, differences over religious dogma that turn bloody, this stuff all came from Roman culture.

One of the many differences I've noticed between Christians and Jews, especially since I started subscribing to The Forward, and reading articles about the various Jewish holidays as they come up, for liberal American Jews, the rituals of religion were reminders of the important spiritual concepts behind them, while it seemed that Christians tended to forget the underlying meaning and make the ritual itself the moral imperative. With every Jewish holiday, I would see, not just in The Forward, but in many of the Jewish journals that I read from time to time, in-depth discussions about how to apply the principles represented by the holiday or the spiritual tradition to every day life, as well as to the events in the world at the moment.

Even when I was a child, it bothered me when I heard preachers talking about “the true spirit of Christmas” as if the true spirit of Christmas was dispensing religious propaganda. To me, the things that dogmatic evangelicals criticized WERE the true spirit of Christmas, and reinforced my view—a view that I would imagine a lot of Jews hold—that most Christians have no idea who Jesus actually was, what he believed, and what he represented, even as best can be pieced together from the New Testament, which most Christians don't know had to have editorial approval from the Roman government to be published (and this was long before the Roman conversion, when Christians were still considered an enemy of the state). If this doesn't make you think twice about the content, nothing will.

A big part of my personal love for the holiday season was specific to my family. My family is in the Hall of Fame of Dysfunctional Families. I hear stories about people keeping their kids in cages and and all kinds of horrible abuse, so I know there is worse out there, but the full story of my family history is one that would make most people's jaws drop. When I told my ex-girlfriend about it, I realized listening to myself tell the things that had happened exactly how dramatic it all was.

I mean, there was so much that happened that you could do like a 12 hour Lord of the Rings type movie about it. I think that a big reason for the divisions in my family is that I've always been on a path to be a public person, and I knew that would mean that my entire family history would be aired, and I was fine with it. I think that the rest of the members of my family are engaged in a desperate effort to try to keep their secrets, and are very frightened that I might tell the story (and absolutely would, if people that I can trust asked me to). My father and my mother both lived what I would consider to be extraordinary lives, even apart from their relationship with one another, and my siblings and I are certainly of interest collectively, if not individually, given all the things we've done.

But the extreme traumatic history in my family, especially before I was born, gave rise to deep resentments and conflicts that have propagated forward to today, and resulted in my being completely, and I feel permanently, estranged from all of my biological relatives. If it were legally and economically practical for me to do so, I would go today and change my name from “Michael David Boyd” to simply “Michael David”, using David as my last name (a good Jewish name!), with the plan that I would add my wife's family name if I ever get married, and she and her family like the idea. That's how bad my family is: While I was once proud to be a Boyd, today I want to scrub the very name off of me now that I know the truth.

But for the catalog of horrors that has been my family life, things always seemed to be better during the holidays. Especially since everyone moved away from home twenty-five years ago, we always spent a lot of family time together during the entire period from the week leading up to Thanksgiving, through New Years. Because all of us siblings except my brother lived in California, my parents would usually rent out a hotel suite in Los Angeles during both Thanksgiving and Christmas weeks, finances permitting, and that would become a sort of family gathering place. We'd go to the mall, go out to eat, we kids would go to movies.

We are a family that talks to each other—or we were—so we would have debates and arguments, but it was during those times that I would feel the hope that had driven me as a child that one day our family would come back together and that all of our divisions would be healed and we'd start working together to make a good life for everyone. But it wasn't to be.

I don't know if it is related to my affection for the holiday season, but traditionally, October has been a horrible month in my life, and this year is no different, although it is far worse than it has been before. On Friday, I became homeless.

I had a long back and forth with my landlord who I believe to be a crook, and was finally, after some peculiar events prevented my court response to his eviction action from being recorded, I was served two weeks ago with a notice stating that I would be forcibly removed by the Sheriff if I did not vacate my apartment by Friday, October 25^th at 6:01am.

I think a great many problems in our society arise from our unwillingness to recognize that emotional incapacity can be as real as physical incapacity. We particularly refuse to acknowledge this with men. A woman is more likely to be heard if she declares that she is emotionally unable to do something, but we even look down on women who make this assertion. But there are times when a mentally healthy human being is unable to act because the pressures they are under are too great, and they are emotionally or intellectually paralyzed.

This is what I began to experience. For six years, it seemed like every action I had attempted to improve my life had only backfired and things kept getting worse and worse. My efforts to find work, or better housing, constantly came up empty. No matter how hard I tried to comply with parole, it became more and more oppressive emotionally. A person can only handle so much.

So revisionist historians will of course be able to look back at the last few weeks, or few months, or all the time since my release from prison and say, “You could have done this, you should have done that”, and I'm sure they will. But the fact is, for the last six years, my primary working theory as a scientist has been that I died and went to hell. You don't need to evaluate that statement scientifically. You only need to use it to recognize that this is how the emotional landscape of my life has really felt: as if I am honestly, literally living in hell.

But out of all the various things that I could have done, I was emotionally incapacitated. It was difficult just to get through the day, shower, shave, eat. I couldn't eat because I was suffered from unrelenting stress nausea, so bad on a couple of occasions that I vomited...well, really dry-heaved because I couldn't eat.

The only upside of homelessness in my particular situation is that it makes it impossible for parole to enforce the 10pm curfew that I have been living under for the last twenty months. If I could afford it, I'd probably just drive around all night, or hit the road and say to the system, “Catch Me If You Can”. But I don't even have money for gas. It was funny, driving was like a mental oasis. As long as my car was moving, I felt the tiniest bit of hope. I dreaded stopping.

One of the problems in our society is that we are not very good at distinguishing between emotional desires and emotional needs. You have one group of people that are ultra-materialists who essentially deny that emotional needs really exists, and categorize all emotional drives as desires, not necessities. Then there is another group that thinks of every whim as a need, and this is where you get a person with no impulse control.

At the initial onset, for me at least, emotional desires and emotional needs feel the same, but when I take some time to reflect, and quiet my mind, I can distinguish between those things I just want, and those things that I will be damaged emotionally if I go on without them. You have to listen to your emotional needs, and if you have the resources to fill an immediate emotional NEED, you don't ignore it because of worries that you might need those resources down the road. It is like you're being attacked, and you have a gun, but you've only got a few bullets left so you save them for later. No.

So on my first night of homelessness, even though I had only a small and dwindling amount of gas and money, I NEEDED to drive. I hadn't been to a casino, I think since the Vegas trip where I saw Scarlett. The San Diego area has a number of very nice Indian casinos. The one I like best, Pechanga, I say that a visit there is like 70% of Vegas. But Pechanga is just outside San Diego county, so I couldn't go there. I went instead to Viejas.

Even when I have money, I rarely gamble. There is an interesting thread in my book Scarlett Blue about my relationship with gambling. I just love walking around casinos. The people-watching, the activity, the energy. I enjoy seeing people having a good time, and it was nice to be back in that environment again.

For the last six years, I've been treated like the worst of the worst in society. Accused of an attempted rape, sent to prison, living as a registered sex offender on parole. We have this strange paradox in our society. Almost everybody agrees that the criminal justice system is almost totally broken, rife with economic, racial and gender injustices, both historical and current. But yet, most of us, in our personal social lives, if we meet a person and learn that they have been to prison, we think less of them. If we learn that they are a parolee, we're fearful. Hell, even when we hear that someone has been ARRESTED, we make negative assumptions, despite the startling statistic that something like a third of people under 40 have been arrested. Bill Gates has been arrested.

So in public life, we all know that system is fucked. But in private life, when we meet someone who has been through it, we act as if the system did the right thing. Or maybe people just see it as erring on the side of caution. But we have to change this. If you're a real dyed-in-the-wool liberal who wants to see criminal justice reform, I would propose that you start by forming some close PERSONAL social relationships with people who have been through the system. One of the main characteristics of those who suffer in the prison-industrial complex is that they are people without allies. The BEST thing that those who want to change the system can do is start filling up courtrooms, paying attention to what's going on, and talking about specific cases in the public sphere.

But the purpose of that digression is to make the point that, despite all that I've done in my life, over the last six years, I've been made to feel like I was nothing but a piece of scum, because that is how I've been treated. Locked up like an animal. Tagged with a tracking device like an animal. People retreating from me in fear when they find out my situation, like people retreat from an animal.

I had forgotten my own virtues because I hadn't had a chance to live them. I saw a brilliant quote on a signboard outside a yoga studio:”We can think of freedom not as the right to do whatever we please, but the opportunity to do what is right.” It was Peter Marshall, an actor, who said that. Though the name was vaguely familiar, I didn't know who he was, but the quote struck me so, that I had to look it up, because it was a simple way of expressing something that I'd been struggling to express my whole life. Because I believed in freedom deeply, as a core value, as many people do, but yet, so many of the people that I heard talking about “freedom” were coming from a completely different political, ethical, and spiritual grounding that I was, and I couldn't figure out how to express the difference. That quote expresses it.

When I lamented that I didn't have my freedom, it wasn't that I was subject to restrictions I had to follow. It was that the very nature of the restrictions prevented me from being able to do that BEST things that I could do to be a productive, stable contributing citizen! That was the paradoxical folly of our criminal justice system...though I'd started to suspect it was not folly, but INTENT.

I wanted the freedom to be a productive person. The freedom to try to bring positive things into the world. Standing in the casino, I remembered that drive, remembered who I was. I remembered that on those many trips to Vegas, on those many nights out in swanky clubs, I was working. I was working on my writing ideas. I was working on trying to understand people, trying to understand the world, so that we could figure out together a better way to live life. After being made to feel like I was nothing, and nobody for so long, I remember what it was that might have made someone like Scarlett Johansson look my direction in the first place. I just hoped it wasn't too late...I think as I pass a BlackWidow slot machine. It's like I'm a fish and Scarlett is the water. I just can't get away from her, except I'm not biting any of the lures that toxic men are dropping down here at me.

I am now about to embark on my third night of living in my car. But the city of San Diego in its effort to fully criminalize homelessness, I guess with the hope that all the homeless will either walk or drive to another city, has passed a law making it illegal to sleep in your car except at certain designated public lots, which I understand are perpetually full. It seems to me that there must be way more homeless people than the official numbers.

I spent my first night of homelessness driving mostly, but I can't do that tonight as I have only about four gallons of gas, and one dollar. I don't know what I'll do tonight. I keep trying to think creatively of some place that no one would think of where I can park and pass the night, until...I can't even write the emotions I'm feeling right now. I've tried and I can't. But I won't go back on the things I believe. I will not give fuel to male dominated society, not even if I am the male dominating. I will not work for a man, unless it is a man that women I can trust say is cool. And first and foremost, I will not let what I'm experiencing right now make me resent the rich people that I respect. Even sitting here homeless, I'm glad Kylie Jenner's got a Bugatti and I hope she's having fun. At least I know someone is.

As this dark wilderness envelops my life, I must admit that I've lost hope...most of it. We can never completely give up on the possibility of a miracle, that the next day will be the one things change, that I'll finally make it to my holiday. But for decades, this life has felt like a punishment to me, and every time that I was filled with optimism that things were about to change for the better, they got dramatically worse, from kidney failure, to prison, to losing everyone who had been a part of my life, to now being homeless.

I've often thought to myself, if God really wanted to stick it in and break it off, what he would do is make you forget what you were being punished for, so if you were a person who had created victims in the past, you would truly endure what I think is the primary emotional state of victimhood: “Why me?”.

In my mind, I had manufactured all kinds of past-life monsters that I might have been to answer that question, “Why me?”, and to account for the negative karma that seemed to be my daily life. But as one round of adversity after another came along, I revised my narrative to keep me on the path that I believed was the right one. There aren't any more revisions left now. It's very simple: I won't accept anything less than a decent life, and failing that, if this world chooses to lock me up, or murder me, so be it.

Part of catalyst for the process of my arriving at the conclusion that Jewish actresses were the social group that I identified with most was the process I've gone through over the last several years of fully reconciling my relationship with my mother, as fully as is possible from her end anyway. It's funny, I don't have any children, and one of my major concerns with reproducing is that I encountered very few women who I would trust as mothers. Don't get me wrong, it isn't THAT hard to successfully get a child into adulthood. But what KIND of adult will they be? It isn't that I didn't trust them to raise what society views as a competent adult. I didn't trust them to share MY values about what a child should be taught and how a child should be raised.

But as I started fancifully entertaining the idea of marrying Scarlett, it occurred to me that the concerns that I have about Gentile mothers don't apply to Jewish mothers at all, zero percent. I'm sure there are some bad Jewish moms out there. But the proof is in the pudding. Jewish people are, for the most part, the way that I think a person should be raised to be. Jewish children are, for the most part, the way that I think a child should be.

As I was thinking about this, it brought me around to confronting a lot of things that had been in the background about how I saw myself and my life. Because of my mother's mental, emotional and behavioral problems, neither I nor my siblings ever had a normal mother-child relationship, and that is one of the basic reasons why our family is screwed up. The difference between my siblings and I is that they blamed my mother while I recognized that she was doing the best she could, given both her mental health struggles and her general personality.

My mother is in my opinion a textbook example of the fact that society shouldn't pressure every woman to get married and have children. She's really not cut out to be a mom, even when she is in her good mental spaces. She's too self-absorbed, and amongst my siblings, she was really only qualified to mother me, because I was the only one of her children who came out with the same extraordinary intellectual capabilities that she has, and I'm grateful that I had her, because a mother who did not share the rare brain capability that the two of us have would not ave been able to teach me certain things I needed to know.

But my mother was just never “Mom”, that warm emotional space of safety, protection and comfort that a mother is to most people. She could not be that. Even beyond her illness, I think my mother is someone that suffers from a general inability to connect emotionally with other people, never diagnosed because doctors were so interested in her more bizarre and violent behaviors. But because of her illness, and just the way in which she was generally at a distance from people and from society, when I was with my mother, I always felt like I had to be the responsible party.

I believe that, if she'd had some real friends, my mother would have been happier as a never-married childless and probably brilliant scientist, although I'm sure she temporarily enjoyed the glitz and glamour of my father's prosperous younger years. Last year, I was eating at Red Lobster with my sister and my mother, and I was talking about my recent blood test results from my doctor. My mother started rattling off a bunch of details about how to perform different laboratory tests. Keep in mind, my mother was at the time eighty years old, graduated college in the fifties, only worked for a couple of years before she met my father and got married in 1961. Since then, her only out-of-home work was when she had a job as a lab tech for just several weeks in the late 80s. But she still knew this stuff cold. Given the way I was, it was moments like these that I felt the strongest connection to my mother.

But my mom is not a hugger. She has never given me a kiss, I think because she read an article decades ago about nearly everybody (90% I think the stats say) getting oral herpes from their mother from sharing food and kissing, and she didn't want to give to us so she never did those things. I've never had a kiss from my mom, but on the bright side, I've never had a cold sore either!

I feel guilty contemplating the effects of the lack of this emotional connection in my life because I feel it as an insult to my mother. Her illness was an incredible burden both for her and for our family, but I wouldn't trade my mother for anyone else, Jewish or otherwise. I was so proud of her, the way she had reached through the darkest of her illness to be as much a mother to me as she could be. There was a painful paradox in the fact that she was the only person in the world that I had absolutely no doubt loved me, but she had no power in the world to use that love to help me, nor did she have the emotional tools to use it to guide me in a way where I could use it to help myself.

And now my mother was being used by my sisters as a part of their ongoing effort to manipulate me. And it makes me realize that as much as I love my mother, her story of her life doesn't add up, and it seems certain to me now that she has decided to take her secrets to the grave. So our relationships has completed its cycle, and so I've said goodbye to her.

But I recognized in examining my relationship with my mother that it informed what I was seeking, not just in a romantic relationship, but in personal relationships as well. So much of the male social bonding rituals have to do with artificial father-son relationships. You see it in sports, in business, even amongst friends. In the past, my father may have been a monster. But in his relationship with me, he was not inadequate. I think most men's fathers are inadequate in some way, and that the world of male bonding is seeking to redress this. But because I didn't feel any inadequacy in my relationship with my father, the male social world was not interesting to me. Because of the situation with my mother, women were an even more fascinating mystery to me than to most men.

I realized that there was something to it, this idea that I had this empty emotional space in me from lacking a normal relationship with my mother, and that I perceived Jewish women as being the most excellent mothers. I want to be clear that I'm not an immature man looking to be babied. Because of my mother's illness, I'm much more logistically independent than all but a few men. I've been doing my own laundry since I was eight or nine. I wouldn't WANT anybody else to do it. I bet I can cook better than a lot of you MAT Girls, given that I'm guessing a high percentage of you are adorably useless around the house and can't boil water without instructions.

So no, I don't want a second shot at having a mother. That would be dysfunctional. But my experience with my mother is what has made me the perfect man for a modern female-led world. I'm looking for women smart enough, strong enough, and responsible enough to say, “I've got this,” and I'll say, “Okay, just tell me what you need me to do.” Like a good son.

It was funny to think of all these Jewish actresses that I admired, most of whom are mothers, in the context of the popular stereotypes about Jewish mothers. It was a hilarious thought because the images of a Hollywood actress and a Jewish mother, in the popular world, are two distant extremes. Jennifer Connelly is older than me. Would she tell me to put on a jacket because it’s cold outside? I don't know. Would Scarlett Johansson make me feel guilty if I didn't call her often enough? Is Amanda Seyfried mad at me that I decided vegetarianism, emotional turmoil and extreme poverty are an incompatible cocktail and I started eating meat again temporarily? Would Natalie Portman tell me I need to go back to school?

For all the joking I hear about Jewish mothers, primarily from Jewish writers and actors working in entertainment, what I see in the real world is different. Jewish mothers usually seem to be exactly as a mother should be, and that probably has a lot to do with why their children are prospering the world over.

I realized as I was working on Scarlett Blue that these Jewish actresses had in a sense been surrogate mothers for me. I didn't know what kind of man I should try to be, but Jennifer Connelly told me in Once Upon a Time in America. For a long time, I was a person who would lay down and take anything, but Natalie Portman taught me, you can only tolerate so much before you have to say,”I'd rather die behind the chemical shed.” For all the criticisms of Hollywood, for its Jewishness and otherwise, movies taught me to be a better person, and I never heard those messages more clearly and more distinctly than when they were coming from Jewish girls.

As I watched movies and saw so many people that were connected to my life in some way, and having had the experience of starting B-Wing Entertainment, writing All-Nighter, and seeing it go through the process, I thought, “The Hollywood community must know me, and all this that is happening in my life must be their version of hazing or paying dues.” Maybe Tobey Maguire wanted to see how I would handle being homeless before he would give his vote to let me in. I don't know. I'm still trying, Tobey. I'm still trying.

But I had reached a point where I felt that, if that were true, they had taken the game too far, and because I didn't want to think that a group of people that I liked and respected so much would make that kind of mistake, it was easier for me to believe that the world was just such a sloppy and disorganized and dysfunctional place that nobody knew what was going on, that nobody could see that I had value, and that I actually only wanted relatively little in return for everything I have.

Though the hope seemed so far away, I wanted this holiday season to be the beginning of a new and better life. What I wanted was a real family, people who I could have faith in, who would also have faith in me. People with whom I would work toward shared values and goals. People that I knew I could count on for genuine meaningful support, and that I would derive joy from offering the same support to them. I wanted to have the ghost of a feeling that I'd experienced so often with my family during the holidays become a reality. I didn't care what the holidays were called. I only cared about the emotional bonds I would have with the people around me.

That is the holiday gift that I want...this year...in the morning...hell, tonight. I ask for this gift, not just as a moment of relief, but for my life: simply the opportunity to be the person I was meant to be. I've lived misery and pain in slow motion for years. I want the chance to live happiness in slow motion for years too. But it seemed like my life would never change for the better, like my Scarlett Blue Christmas would never come, or that if it did, it would come too late when I was nothing but an empty shell of a human being, like a dead tree.

When my kidneys failed, like any emotionally healthy person facing a potentially life-threatening illness, I took stock of my life. I told myself, it was alright. I was young, but I'd been some incredible places, I'd met lot of incredible people. I believed I'd made a positive difference, if only a very small one. I'd lived a decent life. Good enough that I could say goodbye in peace, even though I didn't want to go.

This end feels more real than that one. Back then, I think I still had enough if an ego that deep down, I felt sure I would figure out a way to beat it, and I did...or I got lucky. Or it was a miracle. But I felt like the children of Israel in the Sinai, asking God if he'd brought them out of Egypt only to kill them in the desert. I felt like asking God, “Did you bring me through kidney failure only to kill me as a homeless sex offender on parole, or to send me back to die in prison? And before you start to think that God wouldn't do that, all the Jews that left Egypt died in the desert. But Scarlett made it to Vegas anyway...

And perhaps that was thee only way to really live as an ethical person, to see your life as a bridge to a better future, and to live in such a way as to leave your own personal brick in that bridge. As long as you can feel secure in knowing that you've done that, for yourself, you find something to make it worthwhile, and everything is alright.

It feels like I deserve a better life. But I was always willing to sacrifice to make the world better, if I had to. Perhaps I have to. Perhaps the purpose of my life is for people to be able to look back on it and say, “This cannot be permitted.” Just like the Jews, I know my oppressors won't win, because I know the universe is bigger than me, but I also know that I am an indelible part of it. There aren't any more pharaohs. One day there won't be any more American courts, or prisons or parole offices.

I felt like little Android David in A.I., frozen under the sea staring at the Ice Queen. So I stood in the lobby of the Aria, watching Scarlett as she grew dimmer, drifting away from me in the current of time. I can cry for myself, and I do. Not because my life was so bad as much as because there were things I wanted so desperately that never came, and because this wasn't the ending I had hoped for. In fact, I avoid using the phrase “it couldn't be any worse”, because in my life experience, the universe has often felt like the kind of place where thinking that would precipitate some new disaster. I could imagine ways to make things worse.

As the sun sets on what feels like the last day of my emotional life, I try as best I can to remember what was good about my life, through the searing emotional pain, and fear, and dread, and terror. It grows harder with every passing moment to hold on to these things, as the reality of the moment becomes ever more terrible. But there is one thought left that still makes me smile...

The moment that makes me smile still is that moment in the lobby of the Aria hotel that night seven years ago when I saw the girl that I think was Scarlett Johansson. I can't be sure. But I would walk to the sports book window and bet that it was her, with the last dollar that I have to my name right now, the crisp new one dollar bill that I took when I cashed my first paycheck working for Budget Rent-A-Car in 1995 and have saved until today. I used to keep it in the inside over of a Frank Lloyd Wright book that my friend Cynthia gave me years ago. But its in my wallet now, because I might need it.

I feel a strange conflict about the idea that it was her. There is a part of me that wishes now that I didn't know who she was, that she was just some beautiful supernatural mirage that had floated through my life, and I could pretend she didn't really exist, or that somewhere she was happily married with children, that moment we passed long forgotten.

But then I remembered all the things that I knew about Scarlett Johansson, I was glad it was her, because of everything that I knew about who she was and what she had done. It seemed absurd that I didn't recognize her right away. As much as I told myself that she seemed different than I thought Scarlett Johansson would be, it made perfect sense. I was fooled by the little smile she always wears on camera, but if I didn't know anything about Scarlett Johansson, and you had just shown me her accomplishments, and then the image of that girl in front of me, I would have said, “Of course”.

I wonder now if that was my chance at life and I missed it. I feel like I'll never get the chance to finish Scarlett Blue now. That I'll never be able to show it to Scarlett Johansson and find out what she thinks about it. That I'll never have work that has meaning, real friends, a real family, people who truly support and believe in me, someone to love, and to love me. It was a fun little fantasy that helped get to through the last seven years, the Morphine Theory, I call it. I hope to be proven wrong. But hope that never turns to reality is nothing. An eternal shell game.

In lieu of hope, I hold on to what I had. I've seen and experienced so many wonderful things. But they all seem so far away now. At this moment, I am homeless, sitting in my car in a Wal-Mart parking lot, watching the sun set on what might turn out to be the last day before I am returned to prison, torn to tatters by emotional torture, it’s hard to remember anything positively.

Because I'm homeless, I haven't been charging my ankle monitor. I will NOT sit in public and charge this thing. It's out of the question. If parole wants me to change this device, they need to make sure I have a home to charge it in. My parole officer called me this morning and told me that she was going to issue a warrant for my arrest if I didn't charge it. Maybe she has already done so. But for me, with this system, it’s “die behind the chemical shed” time. Over the last six years and a half years, I have faithfully served the punishment meted out to me. If they want to punish me more, they will have to do it by naked force. And I believe they will. I just keep hoping for my hero to come...But she never does.

But I'll always remember, not “Scarlett Johansson”, the girl in the white t-shirt and the sky blue pajama pants that just got off the elevator. I remember that moment I first laid eyes on that girl, and then the moment when she turned her eyes to look at me. For some reason, that is what means more to me now than anything else. I've been hoping for a miracle to change things, but there seems to be nothing I can do to change my reality for the better. I guess I already had my miracle: I saw Scarlett Johansson in Las Vegas. No matter what has happened, that moment made this whole ride worth it.

Michael David

October 27, 2019

San Diego, California, Earth

Follow me on Instagram: @michaeldavidmodern