Today is what many Irish-American Scranton residents and their cabbage-headed supporters call “Parade Day,” as if dawn in the Electric City broke as a high holy day they celebrate by pulling the nails from their hands, ascending into heaven and sitting at the right hand of God.

One problem: snow postponed today’s St. Patrick’s Day parade.

So there’s no better time to ask when in the name of Jesus Scranton Irish Americans will stop wearing kilts and fawning over bagpipe bands?

The Scots wear kilts.

Members of the British army, including the Scots, play bagpipes.

The Irish play a very different traditional musical pipe, unique Irish uilleann war pipes the English outlawed as part of their savage and failed attempt to eradicate the Irish culture and people. In ancient times Irish warriors painted their skin with wild berries and ran into battle naked. You didn’t see them posing in plaid kilts at weddings and parades and groveling over bagpipes.

Streaking actually dates back to the Garden of Eden which of course was located in the village of Cornamona, County Galway, where my grandfather was born.

No kilts there, lads.

So stop with the kilts and cheering Brit bagpipes, shallow amadon behavior that trivializes Irish history by supporting another nation and the Brit war machine that tried and failed to occupy Ireland forever – a monarchy that still holds onto six counties in the northeastern part of the island that one day will rise as a nation once again.

Uniting Ireland is where attention should lie, not in importing cigar-smoking out-of-town pipe bands (often made up with New York cops and firefighters who really should know better) with beer on their breath as they march into local bars and American Legion halls.

In 50 years of visiting Ireland, other than parade pretenders, I’ve never seen any Irish man or woman wearing a kilt. Here at home I’ve never seen the style in the countless Irish bars across America I have visited where Irish immigrants drink.

I’m also confident saying no Scranton Irish immigrant ever wore a kilt to work in the coal mines or even drinking their tea among lace curtain swells in President Joe Biden’s dull Green Ridge neighborhood when he was a kid and his old man held down a full-time job.

Let me repeat: British troops play bagpipes.

Colonial oppressors apparently need a soundtrack when they try to conquer native people. I picketed a Black Watch bagpipe concert in Hershey once to draw attention to that cruel Scottish infantry battalion of the Royal Regiment of Scotland that completed 11 combat tours and fought against freedom in Northern Ireland.

So knock it off.

Give Ireland back to the Irish.

Let the Scots take pride in their ancient heritage as they continue to fight for nationhood and take back their country from the Crown.

Let English war pipers pipe their last refrain as they lose control over their lost empire and realize once and for all that self-determination and not their pompous blowhard behavior defines liberty.

If my ruffian Irish attitude gets your kilt in a twist, may the road rise up to meet you and kick you right in your stage Irish arse.

Put that in your bagpipe and smoke it.

Speaking into the crackling microphone on the small plane’s radio, the Russian heavyweight wrestler spoke guttural Russian as we flew low and over the stacks of Three Mile Island.

“That ought to get somebody’s attention,” I said.

The wrestler’s laugh sounded coarse as Cossacks dancing on broken vodka bottles.

Ivan and his comrades had rolled into town for an exhibition just a few years after the 1978 TMI nuclear accident. Those men in the small aircraft had recently returned from combat tours in Afghanistan where “mujahideen” freedom fighters eventually handed them and their country a huge loss. The wrestlers came to the U.S. looking for a win, at least on the mats.

I was working for a small weekly newspaper in Harrisburg, Pa., and wound up onboard as part of a makeshift local tour that somehow sent us flying over the damaged nukes. The pilot and his 16-year-old son, two more Russians, Ivan and I packed the six-seater and took off.

I wondered if we overloaded the craft but nobody seemed to care. A few years later the same pilot and his son crashed into electric wires and died flying from the same airport where we took off.

But that day the friendship force flew high, the sky beaming bright blue among scattered clouds. That night, though, even under bright banquet hall lights, the atmosphere grew dark and stormy.

“Daddy hates Russians,” said the woman sitting beside me at a long table.

Shippensburg University hosted the dinner where the wrestlers prepared for an exhibition the next day. None of the Russians except their chaperone spoke English so the well-trained bruisers smiled and dug into their bloody prime rib.

Daddy just grimaced, hating Russians to his core but disciplined enough to control his ire. Don’t ask me why Daddy even showed up at the event but he did, clutching his greasy fork like a sharpened battle ax.

Depending where you lived in those days you quickly got the impression everybody hated Russians. Pennsylvania Dutch rural Central Pennsylvania overwhelmingly hated the anti-God Commies long before the breakup of the Soviet Union. At almost 71, I’m old enough to remember Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev threatening the West with the loosely translated words, “We will bury you.”

I also remember hiding beneath my grade school desk to prepare for nuclear attack. The teacher assigned me the responsibility of lowering the shades. Armed with comic books and chocolate Tastykakes, I also built a personal bomb shelter under the forsythia bush in my backyard.

Nobody in my neighborhood had yet heard the word “détente.”

But Daddy didn’t pose the worst threat to the Russians that night. The rock band hired for the occasion did. Redneck country rockers who normally play biker bars with bourbon on their breath can do a lot of damage to the goal of uniting nations.

Neither American stars and stripes nor the Soviet hammer and sickle hung on the wall behind the musicians that night. A huge Confederate stars and bars battle flag rippled from ceiling to floor as the band kicked into a Credence Clearwater Revival tune, maybe “Born on the Bayou” or “Run Through the Jungle.”

But when our long-haired, scraggly bearded lead singer in a cut-off denim vest finished the song, he pointed the microphone like a cocked Colt pistol, put on a kiss my grits smirk and addressed the Russians.

“We might one day all be killing each other,” he said.

Daddy’s ears perked up.

Ivan and the other Russians smiled.

I pushed back my chair, ready to spring into action at the first sign of a thrown beer pitcher.

The crowd got quiet as a den full of sleeping Siberian tigers.

“Yeah, we might one day all be killing each other,” he repeated.

Increasing tension pounded in a long few seconds.

“But not tonight,” he said.

I drained my beer and headed to the bar for more, relieved that war might come another day, but not that night a long time ago.

Russians recently started a new war in Ukraine.

If Ivan and his comrades are still alive, I wonder what they think. Maybe their children and/or grandchildren are leading the Russian charge, firing missiles, dropping bombs on civilians. Maybe some of their descendants married Ukrainians and live beneath bombs that drop from the sky. Maybe Ukrainian grandchildren make Molotov cocktails to throw and incinerate Russian soldiers.

The madness continues.

Thankfully, TMI failed to melt down.

Ivan and his comrades rode out Afghanistan.

Let’s now hope the world makes it through the threat of nuclear Armageddon. Or maybe “we might one day all be killing each other.”

Stop the war.

Now.

Fifty years to the day after Nguyen Van Minh shot and killed Anthony Venezia in the village of Ben Suc, the former Viet Cong soldier knocked on the front door of the house where Venezia grew up.

Anthony Venezia’s sister Angela answered.

“Yes,” she said.

“These are for you,” he said.

Overcome with soft emotion, Nguyen Van Minh’s eyes welled as he stood at attention the way he did when he joined the fight as a boy. He extended the manila envelope he bought that morning at a strip mall discount store.

Angela looked from his wet black eyes to the envelope and back to his face. Lifting the copper-colored clasp, she opened the flap. The wallet-sized black and white photo showed her brother Tony riding a new wooden hobby horse on Christmas morning when they were four-year-old twins living in Scranton in the same green aluminum-sided house where Angela still lived.

“Where did you get this?”

“Look more,” said Nguyen Van Minh

The next photo showed her mother, Gina, and father, Tony Sr., at the party she and her brother threw for them on their parents’ 17th wedding anniversary. Gina told Angela over chocolate cake with peanut butter icing how she found rice in her hair for days after the wedding. Tony admitted to his son he was so nervous he almost fainted at the altar.

Angel stepped back from the door.

“Who are you?”

“And these,” Nguyen Van Minh said, handing her Tony’s dog tags.

Angela screamed.

“So sorry for your war,” Nguyen Van Minh said.

Police caught up to him at the convenience store four blocks away. Four squad cars rushed to the scene in response to Angela’s frantic 911 call. Five armed officers circled the small man with the stringy beard he sometimes told people made him look like legendary Communist leader Ho Chi Minh. The supervising sergeant did all the talking.

“You have ID?”

 Nguyen Van Minh handed over his American passport.

“You’re a citizen,” the sergeant said.

“I vote every election,” Nguyen Van Minh said.

“Where did you get the photographs of Tony Venezia?”

“From his wallet.”

“Tony died in Vietnam in 1972.”

“I shot him in an ambush.”

“You killed Tony Venezia in Vietnam.”

“Yes.”

“Then you stole his stuff?”

“I wanted souvenirs. Now I return them.”

“Fifty years later?”

“I was wrong to take from the dead.”

The sergeant wasn’t sure what to do.

“I’d like to go home now,” Nguyen Van Minh said.

“You’re under arrest,” the sergeant said.

In his mind Nguyen Van Minh saw himself blending with the jungle that day, a bold 17-year-old freedom fighter waiting to pounce as he tensed and watched the American squad move closer. The 19-year-old walking point, laughing, smoking a cigarette and not wearing a helmet made the most noise. Squeezing one shot from his rifle, Nguyen Van Minh saw the enemy’s head snap back. With the firefight erupting all around, he settled into the adrenaline rush that always came with combat.

All 12 Americans died.

After picking through their bodies, taking what they could use in their continuing fight to rid their land of invaders, Nguyen Van Minh and his guerrilla compatriots moved on. Nguyen Van Minh took photographs and other papers from the body of the young man he killed. After stuffing the personal belongings into the Chinese-issued rucksack he retrieved earlier that week from a comrade killed in action he returned to the body, ripped the dog tags from his enemy’s neck and took them, too.

“Put your hands behind your back,” the police sergeant said.

Nguyen Van Minh, 67, set his jaw and stared straight ahead, not complying but not resisting.

Americans would never express sorrow for their wars.

Nor would they understand those who did.

Imagine the squeaky sucking sound and explosive pop a champagne cork makes when it blasts from the bottle.

Now envision the noise a human eyeball makes when it’s freed from a tight socket after Wally Wilson inserts and turns the corkscrew, twists the orb and removes the unsightly sphere.

Envision?

Unsightly?

Get it?

Gross, don’t you think?

Exactly.

That’s what writing and reading disturbing fiction is all about.

Original, authentic, creative free expression must be understood for what it is – a sometimes vicious attack upon raw propriety we should face. Racism and violence comprise only two bitter facets of America’s harsh reality that’s getting worse instead of better as society relinquishes its hold on sanity, discipline and the common good. Societal insanity now prevails to one degree or another.

The eye-popping reality of a lovable serial killer on the loose horrifies normal decent people. But what defines normal? COVID deaths? Fatal school shootings? Murder occurs every day, all brutal, but some far more grisly than others.

As a decades-long newspaper columnist I covered murder for a living. Sadly, I’ve forgotten too many names of too many dead. But the lessons of their demise remain. All those deaths are warnings, all designed to help me share the admonitions of their lost lives.

These ghastly signs provide the words of Blood Red Syrah, my first novel presented as a “gruesome California wine country thriller.”

What turned mild-mannered Wally Wilson, who loves his mother, into a mad, bloodthirsty killer? What planted the sweet voice of she-devil Syrah into the depths of Wally’s brain? What makes him exchange bloodlust for enlightenment in the vicious struggle to find peace of mind?

Violent death lives in the far reaches of insanity. But what turns Wally Wilson into a psycho killer? Chemicals run amok in Wally’s haywire brain but never poison his heart.

As for Syrah, she loves Wally deeply but will never carve their initials on the trunk of a mighty redwood. Syrah might carve the letters into your face but never on the bark of a tree. Although Syrah and Wally both love nature, human nature is another matter entirely.

Not long after Avventura Press published Blood Red Syrah in October 2018, my wife, Stephanie and I hit the road to California to promote the novel. We set off on a Central Coastal adventure where the book is set and where we used to live, walking the same path we once walked and where Wally Wilson and Syrah walk in the book.

The story is a psychedelic trip through the chaos of an increasingly ruthless society marred by violence, bigotry and hopelessness. Yet, the search for truth prevails, resulting in enlightenment and peace of mind. The moral of the story is that struggle is always worth the ride.

A sometimes difficult read because I take you inside the heads of difficult people, my book opens doors of perception some readers want to keep closed. To remain shut off from the forces of hatred is foolish. Narrow minds only allow you to flee down narrow hallways. Freedom means openness. Liberation comes from facing demons that inhabit and inhibit us all.

That’s why I’m reintroducing Blood Red Syrah.

Never let sleeping books lie.

Awakening takes place with our eyes open. And the odds are slim some maniac will try to cut one out with a corkscrew. Still, beware.

I said slim, not naught.

From where white boy Jimmy Ray stood at the back of the nightclub dance floor he could see the two-tone couple glistening beneath the blue spotlight, dancing slowly, sweating, hardly moving pressed that tight against each other.

In a dress that matched her pale freckled skin, the white woman confused Jimmy Ray by keeping her eyes closed. He couldn’t figure out if she was just trying to be trouble out on another cheap night on the town or was she scared, not knowing what to do to get away from the Black man’s grip?

Jimmy Ray eased his way through the crowd. Close enough now to watch the Black man’s hands, he felt uncomfortable, embarrassed at the way the man held the girl against him with his large palm pulling at the small of her back.

None of this would be happening if the owner didn’t let Black people in the club. Why make normal white folks uncomfortable by mixing races in the first place? Not everybody wanted to mingle. I bet Black people don’t even want to be with white people most times unless you’re a Black man looking for white women. Then you crave it. You need it. You take it the same as heroin or robbing a liquor store.

Jimmy Ray moved closer.

It’s 1945. The war’s over. We won.

Does that give Blacks the right to dance with our women? Go dance with the Germans or the Japs. We got rules here, even laws that say no crossbreed marriage. That includes slow dancing. I was too young to enlist after Pearl Harbor but I would still love to kill some Japs. Just look at them, not even human with their teeth and thick glasses.

The Germans at least look like us except for the pretty boy Aryan blond hair and blue eyes like Swedish pinup girls. Not like guys I work with at the shoe factory. Nobody I pal around with looked like those spit-shined Nazis.

And nobody I know is Black dancing with white women. Who does this tramp think she is unless she’s dancing with him because he’s holding her hostage? Blacks play on white women’s guilt. What, you won’t go out with me because I’m Black?  Somebody better save white women before it’s too late. These girls don’t know better and don’t sense how dangerous it is to be out alone and vulnerable without somebody like me looking after them.

Jimmy Ray would have tapped the Black man on the shoulder real hard and cut in had he known how to dance. His mother tried to teach him when he was about 14, but he felt silly there in the living room trying to learn how to dance with his own mother, holding her at arm’s length moving two steps to the left and two steps to the right like some country clod. Dropping his hands after a few awkward minutes of feeling like a pervert and ducking his head so his mother wouldn’t see him blush, he ran out back to shoot targets with his deer rifle. Now, that he could do. Jimmy Ray sure knew how to shoot. Blasting bullets through beer cans made him feel better than learning to swing and sway with Sammy Kaye.

When the song ended the Black man and the white woman turned and went in separate directions. Jimmy Ray followed the Black man outside where they stood smoking cigarettes at opposite ends of the parking lot. The Black man walked one way up the street. Jimmy Ray walked the other.

The feelings that made him sick to his stomach and dizzy with anger that night stayed with him.

All those years later, for whatever the reason, Jimmy Ray thought about the white girl as he loaded his rifle.

He thought of the Black man as he pulled the trigger.

Fate didn’t care which Black face came to mind, the dancer or the preacher.

As far as Jimmy Ray was concerned, they all looked alike.

News of the ceramic baby Jesus stolen from the church manger scene broke like five-dollar dinner plates in a drunken wedding anniversary argument. In the chilly aftermath, Big Mike’s words went viral, shooting off from his big Pittsburgh mouth like fireworks or foam from a shaken can of Iron City popped the day bosses at the last steel mill within driving distance laid him off.

All over Pittsburgh, especially in his Southside neighborhood, Big Mike’s bold edict lives each year at Christmas when countless celebrants repeat his words as they raise a glass and toast the Nativity. That day in history Big Mike made three little words famous.

“Take me, jagoff,” he said.

Big Mike locked and loaded his favorite word as soon as he read the Sunday paper reporting the theft, registering raw contempt in his limited manner of expression. But that’s all he needed. Pittsburghers got the point.

“Jagoff,” he said.

Looking at his wife Alice he lowered his voice to a cross between a rattlesnake hiss and a psycho whisper the way he always did when he was ready to snap even when he didn’t have too much to drink.

“Do you believe this shit?”

“Excuse me,” Alice said.

“Some jagoff stole the baby Jesus right out of the manger scene at St. Pat’s.”

Alice stiffened.

“Where was Little Mike when it happened?”

Hunched over an overflowing bowl of Lucky Charms, 14-year-old Little Mike picked his nose and took immediate offense.

“Mom, I’m on juvenile probation, OK? I’m on my best behavior. I pee in a bottle every day.”

“Don’t blame the kid,” Big Mike said. “The cops profiled him because he’s Irish and looks like me.”

With all the work involved in baking gingerbread men Little Mike left headless and strewn all over the kitchen, shopping and everything else Alice had to do that her family didn’t appreciate this time of year, she couldn’t be bothered with a swiped statue normally stored in a musty Catholic Church closet.

“So some jagoff stole Mary’s little lamb. What do you want me to do about it?”

“Show some respect,” Big Mike said.

“OK, what are you going to do about it?”

“Don’t push, Alice.”

“I’m not the one daring Mr. Jagoff to take me.”

By dusk Big Mike was stretched out on his postage stamp-sized front lawn, lying in the manger he built from two-by-fours he stole from a construction site and planned to sell. He stuffed the manger with pink and green colored straw left over from the Easter beer can roll the guys at the Irish Club did for the poor kids each year. A handmade sign Big Mike made with Little Mike’s graffiti spray paint and stuck in the grass beside him said, “TAKE ME JAGOFF!”

Reclining in what Alice derisively called his “waddling clothes,” he drank a six pack before anybody in the neighborhood stopped to ask him what he was doing.

“Using myself as bait for the jagoffs,” Big Mike said.

Wrapping himself in an itchy tan Army blanket he bought when the marriage counselor suggested they try camping in the state park a couple of years ago, he tied a white clothesline around his belly so the front wouldn’t open and expose his privates. That’s all he needed, to expose his privates in the manger while portraying the Christ child at Christmas.

“You’ll freeze to death,” Alice said.

Big Mike pointed to the five lumps in the Army blanket.

“Hot water bottles,” he said. “I duct taped them to myself like a suicide bomber.”

By Christmas Eve, thanks to cable TV and social media, the whole world knew Big Mike’s name. The Steelers didn’t matter. Neither did the Pirates or the shuttered steel mills for that matter. National television newscasters debated on the air whether Federal Communications Commission rules allowed them to quote Big Mike. A local historian explained how The Oxford English Dictionary acknowledges the Three Rivers slang as a legitimate word meaning an utterly “stupid, irritating or contemptable person.”

Big Mike didn’t need a dictionary to explain the difference between right and wrong and the breakdown of 21^st Century society. He could smell a jagoff coming a mile away. Standing on the steps of his red brick row house in his bare feet in mid-December, he used what academic linguists called fighting words every time a newscaster shoved a microphone under his nose and he repeated his challenge.

“Take me, jagoff,” he said.

As you might expect, the reviews were mixed. You were either for him or against him. Men mostly rooted for Big Mike. Handmade signs went up all over town, in bar and office windows and even on a couple of billboards. Women saw him as just another big goof like their husbands or boyfriends, overreacting, loaded and making an ass out of himself for the holidays.

Big Mike saw himself otherwise, of course, and explained his pure intentions to Alice.

“I’m like them Christmas mice ornaments we put out each year my mother gave us, the ones I thought were real stuffed rats when I was a kid,” he said.

Alice looked at Big Mike like he lost his mind, found it then sold it on EBay at a discount.

 “How are you like the Christmas mice, Mike?”

“Weird but lovable,” he said.

Within two days news crews started showing up from all over the world.

“I’m a Christmas miracle,” Big Mike told the BBC.

And so he was the reason for the season, confident enough to drink two six packs of Iron City a night and let people take pictures and selfies for free. Not an argument or fist fight broke out at Big Mike’s Christmas crèche while he sprawled in the manger. Senior citizens sometimes blessed themselves when Big Mike belched.

“If that doesn’t signal world peace, nothing does,” Big Mike told CNN.

“You know what you’re doing is sacrilegious,” Alice said one night when the crowds went home and Big Mike came back inside.

Incredulous, he highlighted his success.

“You been counting the cash in the donation basket at the end of my shift?”

“Three grand so far,” she said.

“It’s a godsend,” Big Mike said.

Alice saw the opening and tried to lay hands on her own Christmas miracle.

“Can I buy a new vacuum cleaner?”

“And a crock pot for the kielbasa,” Big Mike said.

That was their best Christmas ever.

Little Mike even got sprung from juvenile probation.

And nobody stole Big Mike from his gala Yuletide display.

Not even a jagoff would want him.