Bloodsuckers
Season 11, #2: Stargazing into Occupation Metro Surge, The Red Balloon, and vermin
“This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco
This ain’t no foolin’ around
No time for dancin’, or lovey dovey
I ain’t got time for that now.”
—Talking Heads, “Life During Wartime”
LET’S START WITH THE city bus driver.
He was driving Route 7 on Saturday, February 14, 2026, heading south through Minneapolis’ Nokomis neighborhood, blocks from where I now live.
A quick digression: I haven’t owned a car since 2015. When I left magazine publishing in April 2012 (and launched StoryShed Media LLC), I sold my 2002 VW Jetta. It was weird being an American in America without a car. Within a year or two, that stigma wore off. No one cared. And guess what? All the money I’d saved not owning a car—it was a revelation! So, I depended mostly on city bus travel. As long as I wasn’t far from a bus stop, all was good.
Sometimes my fellow riders and I would get a funny, friendly bus driver. Mostly the drivers meld into the machinery like phantoms behind the wheel. I like the engaging bus driver, but will take the ghost in a heartbeat.
That Saturday I got neither.
I should’ve known when I boarded his bus at the transit station and asked if he knew where I should get off (I was going to a DFL committee meeting at a Minneapolis public library, so the location should’ve been familiar to him) “What’s the cross-street?” he muttered. I didn’t know. Our relationship, such as it was, went—literally and figuratively—south from there.
My second clue was when the bus stopped in the middle of the street not far from the station. What the hell—? I thought. I was near the front of the bus and I saw the driver had opened his window to yell at a USPS carrier who’d parked too close to a stop. The postal worker seemed perplexed.
Finally we were moving again and near my stop. I thanked the driver (a young man with a beard and wearing the uniform with the official cap) and got ready to get off when the door didn’t open. I glanced back and he sneered, “Behind the line!” then shook his head as if I was the most clueless moron on the planet. I stepped back and, after what seemed like a long couple seconds, he opened the door.
I leapt off the bus and thought, “Wow. What an asshole.”
I didn’t dwell on it over the committee work we had to do that afternoon, but on the bus ride back I wondered if I’d get the same driver and what I’d do or say to him. When that returning bus arrived, it was a different driver. But still I was curious: “What was up with the other guy?” It was with a sense of sadness and dismay that I considered he probably wasn’t happy being a bus driver. He had control issues (with the postal worker, with me as a rider—probably anything within his line of sight), and it occurred to me: that cat’s gonna burn to a cinder if he doesn’t flex it up soon or Soon.
Mr. Inflexible Bus Driver was basically a vampire of his own mind, craving expectations from life that life will never fully allow him to enjoy.
How did I know that?
Because I recognized my younger self in him, naturally.
1
“Heard of a van, it’s loaded with weapons
Packed up and ready to go
Heard of some gravesites out by the highway
A place where nobody knows…”
LET’S REEL IT BACK two days to Thursday, Feb. 12. I’m feeling pretty good, the sun is out and the forecast’s for warmer weather—a total fluke for mid-winter Minnesota.
I’d finished business with my local post office and was waiting for a southbound local bus home. Another guy was waiting at the stop.
Isaiah is a 26-year-old mixed race young man with thin facial hair and a curious mind. When I met him at the stop for the same route Driver Crankypants works, we talked about a transit app I use on my iPhone. He downloaded it and thanked me for the tip. He said he lives with his aunt and was looking for a job—in fact, was on his way to an interview as we spoke. I wished him luck. Then he shot me a nervous glance. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Fire away.”
“What do you think of all the ICE stuff?”
“Fuck ’em,” I said. He chuckled, obviously relieved. (I’m sure I went off a bit more after saying that but I can’t recall the full extent of my rant. It was juicy.)
It was my turn to ask Isaiah questions. After all, he mentioned living with his aunt, so I asked about other family, friends, what kind of support he had. He seemed gratified by the attention. For my part, I was concerned: Would he find a job? How would he learn new skills and expand his network? Then I realized his asking me that question proved a bent toward curiosity and I’m sure I reassured him on the interview as we boarded the arriving bus.
We didn’t sit together; I was itching to get back to my own work and didn’t want him to be any later to his interview. He glanced over at me and I smiled to him as I left the bus, “Good luck, Isaiah!”
He smiled and waved back.1
* * *
Pascal is a young Parisian boy in a movie from my childhood.
“He retrieves a balloon tied to a lamppost,” writes critic Michael Koresky, “only to discover that it seems to have a mind and personality of its own. At times the balloon follows him around like a loyal dog, at others like a teasing best friend; the two form an inseparable bond, one that only an uncaring world would dare to untether.”2
How director Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon (1956) ties into current events is a mystery I hope to unravel here (among other things).
“Call it My First Art Movie,” Koresky writes.
Mine as well, good sir.
2
“The sound of gunfire off in the distance
I’m gettin’ used to it now
Lived in a brownstone, I lived in a ghetto
I’ve lived all over this town.”
IT’S TRUE. I HAVE lived “all over this town.”
Since 1992 I’ve been an urban dweller, after teenage years in suburbia (if you can call a Lake Minnetonka cabin that), then an inner-ring suburb (Hopkins), and then adopting St. Paul as my home for 24 years. In 2019 I moved to South Minneapolis, which feels older to me in my memories than St. Paul, as downtown Minneapolis was my haunt as a high school student. Later, in college, friends from the University of Minnesota (where my late father worked as the Health Sciences Planning Coordinator for a quarter of a century) and I often traipsed around Minneapolis’ Uptown neighborhood, fresh from dancing downtown at Uncle Sam’s (now known as First Avenue) or partying in storefront upstairs rentals and throwing up in back alleys.
Oh what a time it was.
My first-ever rental was at the age of 27 in Hopkins, after I landed my first corporate job as a proofreader in a Creative Services department (that experience is well worth another essay, no doubt). That debut apartment was a lot like the one I’m in now, but vintage to the location (that is, built in the 1970s) whereas the current place was two-years new when I signed the lease in 2019.
St. Paul city life hit me fast when I quit that corporate job on December 7, 1992, to launch my first business, Available Light Creative, focusing on copywriting, editing, and desktop publishing. From 1993 to 2019 I moved five times, each an attempt to get closer to somewhere I could call “home.” Dad insisted I get a mortgage and buy something “to build equity.” I didn’t want a house, so narrowed the search to condos, town homes, small properties. In 2006 I found a cooperative condo I liked (built in the 1950s) in St. Paul’s Summit Hill neighborhood, and I thought “home at last!” That year I’d been hired as managing editor of a national magazine, Law & Politics, and their flagship Super Lawyers magazine. I thought I’d “arrived.”
Maybe I had.
* * *
There was a time when our French lad Pascal thought his life would always be the same: Walking from home to school, from school to the pastry shop for a treat, and then home again to supper and sleep. Wake up in the morning and do it all again.
Sound familiar? Me too.
Then one day, something happens: he makes a new friend that will change his life.
Where did I first see The Red Balloon? I’m willing to bet it was in the mid-1960s, after we’d moved to Maryland, where I attended Olney Elementary School. “Though the film often triggers cheerful nostalgia in its adult devotees,” Michael Koresky writes, “who remember it for its bursts of candy apple red, it is actually remarkably subdued.”3
That “candy apple red” caught my eye and spoke to me as a pulsating, vital life force. It drew me in. Pascal could’ve been me; I could’ve been Pascal. The film was like a private church service, learning a ritual I was only then beginning to understand: How to be in the world. How to find yourself.
And maybe, how to recognize home?
3
“Transmit the message to the receiver
Hope for an answer someday
I got three passports, a couple of visas
You don’t even know my real name.”
“THE WRITER’S JOB IS to get the main character up a tree,” so the Nabokov-attributed quote goes, “and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.”
If January 2026 were a tree, and I’m the main character of this story, then golly-gee, you betcha, I’m frantically bracing myself ’round the trunk of that ol’ tree for the incoming missiles.
That artillery is easy to recognize: First it was the federal ICE occupation of the Twin Cities and the subsequent murders of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, as well as the detention, physical assault and verbal abuse, stalking and terrorizing of countless other Minnesotans. The second was being laid off my full time job on Wednesday, January 28, and scrambling to secure financials for the months ahead. Close on that came waves of doubt and worry: Would I be homeless? How will I find enough paying work now that I’m in my mid-60s? What do I do about health care and—BAM.
A fourth stone was hurled.
My bedroom has bed bugs. That explained the welts, itching, scratching and—well, actual bugs. Full of blood. “Really?” I thought. “C’mon, man. This is too much.”
So, an exterminator is on the way. I’ve been sleeping on a living room sofa and prepping the bedroom for the forthcoming killing field. The apartment lease puts the onus of extermination payment on the renter, so I’m out $1,300.
And on top of that, rent will soon be due.
Thanks, Vladimir. You can put that other stone down now.
* * *
Pascal discovers his new friend a mere three minutes into The Red Balloon. At first it’s just a boy and his balloon—that’s all people see, if they notice at all. The balloon has made him late for school (he can’t take it aboard the city bus, so he has to run to get there in time).
The balloon waits for him to leave school and he takes it home for the first time, only to have it tossed out the window by someone, either a parent or the maid.
And that’s when something miraculous occurs.
4
“High on a hillside, the trucks are loading
Everything’s ready to roll
I sleep in the daytime, and I work in the nighttime
I might not ever get home.”
HERE’S THE DEAL. I have been out protesting, but not all the time. I have not had in-your-face encounters with ICE. I don’t intend to—no how, no way. There are plenty of ways to effectively oppose this so-called government.4
One thing I’ve noticed living in Occupied Minnesota: there are people who get this is illegal, morally corrupt, and absolutely indefensible…and there are folks who put their blinders on and continue to act as if we’re living in a state of near normalcy.
Yup. Amazing, huh?
You see, the thing really crawling under my skin (aside from repeated exposure to Cimex lectularius) is general American indifference to the changes all around. It’s not only the social aspects, but consumer culture, corporate compliance with the regime (yes, it’s a regime, not an administration) and the financial tentacles that emanate out from those sources. We’ve never lived through anything like it. It has definitely changed the decisions I make on a daily basis—where I shop, who I choose to deal with, what I say and to whom, and—being newly unemployed—it’s affecting how I’m being viewed by others who once saw me as “dependable” and “tactful.”
Look, I can’t change others’ opinions of me. Like my Crankypants Bus Driver, he couldn’t care less who I was that day he refused to open that bus door. He saw me as an impediment to his worldview—a mere reprobate. I needed to toe the line.
I needed to be given a lesson. And he was gonna let me have it.
* * *
“You must obey me,” Pascal says to his sentient red balloon, “and be good!”
Naturally, when any human realizes that kind of power, they want to exert it at every opportunity. But there’s The Moment that is the core of Lamorisse’s film. Bright little Pascal does something astounding—maybe one of the first moral lessons I took from The Red Balloon as a child. He grabs the balloon by its string…
And then he lets go.
Trust, emotional intelligence, faith, and belief in his newfound friend.
That’s when the balloon responds in kind by playfully evading him, but always—always—coming back.
5
“Heard about Houston? Heard about Detroit?
Heard about Pittsburgh, PA?
You oughta know not to stand by the window
Somebody’s seen you up there.”
“THEY CAN SURVIVE FOR months without a blood meal.”5
That’s the fact, Jack. Those pajama party sleepovers with your buggy little friends are gonna cost ya some platelets.
This was a first—well, everything this year has been a first. One, I’ve never been laid off a job, ever. I’ve quit jobs to go to school or because I was offered another one. And I think a long time ago I had fleas (probably from a family pet) and of course I’ve been bitten by mosquitos and black flies while camping in northern Minnesota.
But I’ve never experienced the horror of bed bugs.
In one respect it could be worse: a bed bug swarm, or bed bugs with noisy flapping wings (they don’t have wings at all), or a superpower like morphing into Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. The thing is they like the dark, they like my bed, and they aren’t about to venture out of the bedroom to poke around in the fridge at midnight for a shot of V8. Ain’t gonna happen.
According to this source, “Although bed bugs can be infected with at least 28 human pathogens, no studies have found that the insects are capable of transmitting any of these to humans.”6 Things are looking up! Apparently they keep it clean, aside from a vampiric lifestyle: “They are not attracted to dirt or grime, but rather to the carbon dioxide, warmth, and odor of humans.”
Is there a deodorant repugnant to bed bugs? If so, point me to it!
* * *
The Red Balloon’s director was a documentary filmmaker. But for this movie he needed to, as Koresky states, “rely on the persuasions of cinematography, editing, and sound—and some very thin threads—to make his audience believe in magic, that his titular character was a plausible living being, emoting and reacting without the benefit of a voice or even a face.”7
In one of my favorite scenes, Pascal and his balloon pal visit a flea market. While the boy regards a painting of a young girl, RB admires itself in a mirror. Their time together is like a delightful independent date: they separate to experience the environment, then rejoin to continue their journey.
Like best friends do.
6
“I got some groceries, some peanut butter
To last a couple of days
But I ain’t got no speakers, ain’t got no headphones
Ain’t got no records to play…”
FRAGILITY IS A STRANGE condition and probably more common than most people realize. You could be looking at a famous bodybuilder—who’s suddenly dead from a massive heart attack. Then there’s that 90-lb. weakling who wins a marathon. Strength and fragility are deceptive on the surface. Sometimes you have to dig deeper, and even then you might come up with nothing.
I say this because every time I’ve had major life crises (like I’m going through now) the first thing I notice is how fragile life is, deep down, at the core. Prior to the crisis I was on autopilot—going through the motions to keep the hamster wheel turning and everything seeming “fine.” Behind all that, there’s a man with a machine set to demolish the wheel. Or I realize that I’m the man with a machine, setting myself up for a fall.
Which brings me back to that Route 7 bus driver. I suppose I need to thank him; his behavior was a mirror to my past.
Raised by a Type A authoritarian father, and variously soothed by an arts-loving mother, I rebelled against anything that smacked of rigidity and order. “Michael, go left!” they demanded. And I went right. My late 20s were rough. Once I was living on my own, I had more emotionally rough days than good. I felt restless and angry.
I met with a psychiatrist (and later a psychologist) in the late 1980s after I began experiencing depressive symptoms at the same time my mother was being treated for severe catatonic depression. Like mother, it seemed, like son. The shrink declared in one later session that he believed I suffered from dysthymia, a long-term, simmering-under-the-surface form of depression. He put me on meds (Prozac at first, later Zoloft) and that seemed to help. When I met with the psychologist, an overly chirpy older man named Sigurd, I felt prodded and needled by his approach. “You, Michael,” he said to me bluntly, “seem to prefer the Middle Finger Way.” Just an observation, he added.
While I resented that at the time, I’ve never forgotten it.
Because he was correct.
* * *
When Pascal goes to buy a pastry, and commands the balloon to wait for him outside—suddenly it’s abducted by the gang of street boys. Only moments before, RB slipped out of Pascal’s hands to follow a girl with a blue balloon. When Pascal retrieves it, blue balloon follows suit and pursues RB.
So in short seconds we’ve gone from fancy and delight to horror and dismay.
Remind you of anything?
7
“Why stay in college? Why go to night school?
Gonna be different this time!
Can’t write a letter, can’t send no postcard
I ain’t got time for that now.”
BLOODSUCKERS ARE EVERYWHERE. YOU can tell by how they behave.
What did the Route 7 bus driver do? He remained authoritarian, inflexible. What did my bus stop companion Isaiah do? He gave me the gift of his curiosity and attention. And I returned the same in kind.
Bloodsuckers are drainers. There’s no capacity to give, only take. Their forms are many: idiotic rules and regulations, inflexible work hours and micromanaging bosses, property management companies that feed on their residents are if they’re non-rechargeable batteries, ready to be shit-canned at the first dip in financial viability. Governments that refuse to govern, senators and representatives who fail to give attention to and serve their constituents.
Drainers, bloodsuckers, all.
Bloodsuckers exist in alienated families and unrewarding friendships, marriages, and long-term relationships, too. These are often the most difficult to disengage from. In many cases there’s gaslighting: “Oh, you don’t really believe that,” you might be told. Or, “Everyone has these challenges/some have it worse…what makes you so different?”
Over the years it’s been a never-ending battle to discern bloodsuckers from heart-warmers—givers who will support you no matter what. Even more confusing is when those roles change (either logically or inexplicably) and new decisions must be made or old ones reconsidered.
Like where I am right now.
* * *
Pascal and his mother (or is she his grandmother?) walk hand in hand up the cathedral steps to a church service. Close on their heels is RB, which slips through the massive oaken doors—only to be swiftly expelled, and with Pascal chasing behind.
Together they escape the churchyard for higher ground.
8
“Trouble in transit, got through the roadblock
We blended in with the crowd
We got computers, we’re tapping phone lines
I know that that ain’t allowed…”
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 13, WAS my last full-time paycheck. It was meager, but was at least cheering to see a deposit into the bank account over a debit.
At my age, finding a new full-time job will be next to impossible. But maybe that’s not what the times require. After all I’ve got years of work experience in trade book publishing, small publications and magazines, a goddamn bachelor’s degree, and post-graduate work at the renowned Denver Publishing Institute (Class of ’03). And StoryShed Media LLC is a going concern with projects and collaborations and plenty of work to do.
It’s my lifeblood, no doubt.
I will probably need to move, either out of the city (which sort of breaks my heart) or even out of state (maybe heading east over west; north over south), so between now and then a winnowing process has already begun: selling things I no longer need or use, recycling, donating, or selling anything valuable to put in savings, and prospecting for contract and part-time work to tide things over.
It’s not insurmountable, but definitely daunting.
The winter of 2025-26 has been a roller coaster, and a hateful ride at that.
Slather on the slime that are the criminals yet to be apprehended in the Epstein files, the murderers lurking in the regime along with their protectors, and the muck only gets stinkier and deeper and, well, muckier.
Come what may, I plan to fight on. You too?
* * *
Pascal’s friend RB is abducted by the street gang twice—at first he’s able to outwit them and retrieve RB, which adds to the film’s building tension. We’re curious about how this will end.
We don’t know.
9
“We dress like students, we dress like housewives
Or in a suit and a tie
I changed my hairstyle so many times now
I don’t know what I look like!”
AT THE DFL COMMITTEE session that Saturday of the Inflexible Bus Driver, 50 or 60 South Minneapolis residents packed into a small public library meeting room. Our task for the day was to sort through platform resolutions by category. That was a first step. I felt relieved to be among neighbors and doing something productive about my community. I sensed they felt the same way. It was a lively, pulsating hive of heart-warmers.
But as the buzz in that room got buzz-ier, and everyone was standing and shifting around sorting resolution papers, I noticed a change. The apparent extroverts were happy to dip in wherever needed. As an introvert (with occasional extrovert tendencies) I was feeling drained, not by the people or the mission, just all the activity. One woman, Elizabeth, who at the introductions said she worked as a writer-editor, had scooched closer to the door leading to the main library space and caught my eye. I pretty much sensed why.
It was all too much. She had felt it too.
[Meanwhile, back at my infested apartment, an imagined conversation with my bedroom-emerging bed bug:]
Me: “Oh. Hi there. How—?”
BB: (suspicious) “—Where you been, boy?”
Me: “Well, uh, I was tired so crashed out on the sofa, I been meaning to tell ya—”
BB: “SHUT UP, human. I will have blood. You got stones that move and trees all speakin’ and street be sayin’ magot-pies and choughs and rooks brought forth—”
Me: “Excuse me, Mr. Bug…”
BB: “Name’s Bert.”
Me: “Sorry, Bert. Um. I was just gonna mention they’re comin’ for you tomorrow.”
BB: “Git back in that bed, boy! If’n I’m set to die, I’ma goin’ out with a belly full of blood. Your blood. —That’s the secret’st man of blood.”
Me: “Your Shakespeare’s very good.”
“Why thank ye. Now… BED!”
* * *
Down narrow back alleys, winding streets, and steep stairways, Pascal and Red Balloon evade the street gang.
After RB is abducted a final time, Pascal searches for it, finding it hovering above a back lot and being pelted with rocks and pebbles from the boys’ slingshots.
“Fly away, balloon!” Pascal screams.
10
“You make me shiver, I feel so tender
We make a pretty good team
Don’t get exhausted, I’ll do some driving
You oughta get you some sleep.”
TEAMWORK MAKES THE DREAM work. Or so they say.
But people today are a scattered bunch. I wonder if bed bugs are more social. It doesn’t seem so. Like predator politicians (I don’t care which party), they wake up and look for a host to feed on. That’s their whole raison d'être, time and time again, since they first slithered up from the primordial soup of modern history.
Looked at one way, the despair is overwhelming. Some days I don’t know how I can pick my poor ol’ bug-bitten body up and out onto the mean streets of Minneapolis, with its grimy off-white canvas, trash-strewn bus stops and street corners, the gaunt, haunted faces of chain-smoking city dwellers, glancing up at the cold steel gray sky as if it were a fucking magazine to flip through. It seems impossible to keep going.
But I do.
* * *
That open back lot is Red Balloon’s Golgotha.
Pascal is its John, the Beloved Disciple.
And we are witnesses to the end—a single slingshot missile pierces RB, at which it withers and deflates, its skin crusting over like a dried riverbed and its bright candy apple red fading to earth.
One last indignity—a boy’s foot stomps on what’s left.
11
“Burned all my notebooks, what good are notebooks?
They won’t help me survive
My chest is aching, burns like a furnace
The burning keeps me alive.”
THE SONG FADES AS I suppose my life will. No applause, no cheering, no celebration party, no babies to kiss or ships to christen with a bottle of champagne.
Or maybe that’s a premature conclusion?
I don’t know—I can’t know. There are too many factors in play, largely outside of my control. This, I think, is true of everyone—no matter how rich you are.
What good are the notebooks? They might be the only good thing, sorry David Byrne.
Maybe the burning is the desire to create and to contribute, to give others your attention and curiosity, your aid and comfort, your one beating heart, pumping with the blood that only you can provide, and which is never mine to take from you, ever.
What if that were true for everyone?
What kind of world would that be?
* * *
And what if in The Red Balloon that kill shot from one stupid kid were the end of the movie—just “cut to black” and title over: La Fin? Kinda depressing, right?
Nope. Not for me, nor for you.
What happens next is pure magic. Unbelievable. Yet it makes sense; it feels true.
Because it is.
Extra texture and notes
How does burning keep you alive? Ask Jack London.
If you ask a bed bug it will say it doesn’t like hot anything. Stinky-smelly-tastes-like-jelly human warm, yes—but super hot, oven hot—that’s a hard no.
Special thank you to Tom Murphy for use of his marvelous dingbats. Also thanks to Jo Petroni for her intro divider.
This is where, at the departing bus stop, I discovered the Oracle on the ground.
The Red Balloon DVD notes by Michael Koresky, Criterion Collection, ©2008 Janus Films. All rights reserved.
Ibid.
“NE resident sent to hospital after protesting ICE,” by Al Zdon. Retrieved from the Northeaster Newspaper, published on Feb. 3, 2026.
Retrieved from the New York State Department of Health.
Kolb, Adam; Needham, Glen R.; Neyman, Kimberly M.; High, Whitney A. (2009). “Bedbugs”. Dermatologic Therapy. 22 (4): 347–52.
The Red Balloon DVD notes by Michael Koresky, Criterion Collection, ©2008 Janus Films. All rights reserved.
Wonderful piece, Mike. I hope the bed bugs have been laid to rest by now.
I watched The Red Balloon several times in elementary school. My sons also enjoyed it. Even though it's been years since I've seen it, I remember it well. Beautiful movie.