Last night I got a one hour massage from my massage therapist who has come to my home for perhaps eight years. I paid him for my regular two hour massage. My long history with this guy, a very soft-spoken man who grew up in the valley to the east where the more hardened folks of this area reside. It’s ranch country and they are ranch-strong, which I suppose is a lot like being farm-strong. I got to know him much better four years ago when I fell through my deck one fine morning after a rain. Strangely enough, I was unharmed by the event on a physical level, but was much impacted financially in that it ended up with me spending four months acting as contractor with three guys rebuilding my entire deck with constantly revised and expanded expectations for what had to be done. This involved me making payroll every Friday for those four months for the three guys. One guy was Handy Brad, who was supposed to be in charge, but whose character is so risk averse as to make it hard for him to actually be in charge except when we were at the stage of tiling the surface, for which he was, indeed, a master-craftsman. The highest paid guy on the crew was Dave, who happened to be my massage therapist’s father, who was a gig-working carpenter of some not-inconsiderable capability.
While all three guys on the crew were working class conservatives, none was more resolved in his MAGA sentiments than Dave. This actually made him no less pleasant on a day-to-day basis so long as politics was not the topic, and it usually wasn’t since there was much to do each day. This was all during the post-election nonsense in 2020, which was an eye-opener for us all. Then came January 6th. Put this into context. We had all had a measure of relief that the election was past and that Trump was on his way out. We had gone through a pleasant Holiday season and were into the new year with great hopes for a brighter day. Then, the attack on the capital happened. I remember having it live on the TV in the kitchen as it was happening with the three guys out on the half-finished deck working away as though nothing was happening. At one point I opened the door to the deck and yelled at them that there was an insurrection underway and they were attacking the capital. Dave thought I was probably over-reacting and didn’t hesitate to tell me so. The next day when he arrived he told me that he had watched the events on TV and was surprised that it was, indeed, as bad as I had described and he said he did not condone that sorry of violence. He spoke quite loudly that he did not think most conservatives and Republicans would support that sort of thing. His reaction reassured me that he was the reasonable man I thought him to be.
As time has gone by, Dave has moved back to Idaho and settled down up there amongst the reddest of the red Americans. I have heard through his son during our massage sessions that he is less convinced now that the events on that day were all that bad and that they were less of an insurrection and more of a mostly peaceful protest. In other words, he, like most Republicans that want to stay with the Party has backslid as Trump has decided to stay engaged and run again. He and all the congressional Republicans like Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy have made the calculated decision to gloss over the events of that day and adjust their memories such that they are more supportive of those insurrectionists and less concerned about the violence of that day. That disappointed me, but didn’t shock me. I think we are all becoming more or less numb to these new political realities.
Then about six weeks ago, during a massage session, I add the mistake of mentioning something about the immigration case being made by Trump and other Republicans. What I said was that I live in a border country and we have no problem here with illegal immigration. In fact, I said we benefit greatly from the manual labor pool that is available to us here and the pleasant Mexicanized nature of local commerce. My therapist suddenly vehemently disagreed with me. He said that I was insulated up here in the North County and that down where he lives (Point Loma) the illegal immigrants created a real mess for the community and that it really was a serious problem. I asked him if it was that bad, why didn’t Trump let the negotiated border bill put together by Oklahoma Senator James Langford go through rather than telling Speaker Mike Johnson to table it so that Trump could more effectively run on the border issues more strongly against Biden (and then Harris). My massage therapist immediately said he didn’t know anything about those details and was annoyed that I was bringing such an insignificant detail into play in the discussion. If this had been any of my red friends, I would have slammed them over such an obvious diversionary tactic, but things are different when engaged in a political discussion with a service provider. I let it drop and just shut down the conversation. He and I both knew that we had gone to a bad place and needed to stay away from these topics.
At the same time, due to his baby Daddy schedule, he needed to move the times further and further back in the day and was starting to say he could only come at 5:30pm. I found that an inconvenient time, but I put up with it given the quality of the massage and the time we had worked together. This all coincided with several trips we took in September, so I started scheduling him less and less regularly. The truth is that it has become an expensive luxury for me which when combined with my twice weekly stretch sessions and my massage chair, has started to feel excessive. I also have to admit that the political atmosphere, especially as we are approaching this tense election and what is likely to be a turbulent post-election period, has made this arrangement all the more off-putting.
This week, I scheduled him with the expectation that I would tell him we should cool it for a few weeks until the election and my workload ease off. As has happened occasionally since he has shifted to a time that coincides with San Diego rush hour, he texted me at 5:00 saying that he was encountering very heavy traffic and would likely be a bit late. He finally got here at 6:00pm and for the second time in recent history, I have told him I would take a shorter massage since it would otherwise get too late for both of us. The last time this happened I cut the 120 minutes to 90 minutes. This time, I cut it to 60 minutes. At the end of the massage, I started to tell him that we should pause things for a few weeks, when he told me that the driving had made this arrangement too difficult and time-intensive for him and that it might not make sense anymore. I agreed and was thrilled that he was the one who called the ball on the need to back off. He told me he and his wife were expecting their second child and I told him that was all the more reason he needed to stay closer to home. We agreed that we might be able to organize an occasional massage on a Saturday or Sunday, but not for a while.
I feel that regardless of how the election unfolds, and how traffic calms or not, this situation has run its course. I am glad he and his family are growing and moving on and I am glad that I am moving on from the relationship. He is still the best massage therapist I have ever had (and I’ve had many), but something has changed in our relationship and even without talking politics, that something in the air is a damper on the whole situation. I’m sure he feels it too. Sometimes things just move on without you even knowing it’s happening.